Epiphanies Musicals
Meet the 2025
Semifinalists!
Riverbend
Book and Lyrics by Caroline Game
Music by Michael Light Oosterhout
Riverbend is a modern musical retelling of the Greek myth of Daphne and Apollo. Daphne is an eighteen year-old recent high school graduate living in a small rivertown on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Feeling her late mother’s absence in town, she plans to take her sailboat for a yearlong trip on “The Great Loop”, a journey her mother took when she was her age. However, when twins Aiden and Diana move to town, Daphne’s heart and her plans are challenged by feelings she’s never known.
Caroline Game (she/her) is a librettist/lyricist, and actor/singer with a passion for telling complicated, compassionate stories. Her current projects include Riverbend (Emerging Artists Theatre’s Sparkfest 2023, Drama Club Camp 2024) and Hourglass (Drama Club Camp 2025, Sandbox Musicals ‘Playspace’). Her work has been featured in EAT’s Sparkfest, the New York Theatre Festival, and the Druid City Pride Festival. Professional performing credits include Ghost (Molly), Significant Other (Laura), and Mamma Mia (Lisa, u/s Sophie). She is originally from Atlanta, GA and is now based in New York City. She received her M.F.A. in Musical Theatre Writing from NYU Tisch and is a member of the Dramatists Guild.
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Michael Light Oosterhout (he/him) is a composer/lyricist, music director, and playwright. Passionate about genre-bending and blending myriad styles into contemporary musical theatre, he is chiefly interested in exploring the relationship between the ancient and modern worlds, as well as highlighting issues affecting queer youth. Michael's current projects include Windy (chamber opera), Evelyn Evans (play), The Right Reasons (song cycle), and Riverbend (musical), the latter of which was featured in Emerging Artists Theatre’s Spark Theatre Festival NYC. Past projects include Ariadne: A New Musical,
Sparta! The Musical, Euripides' Medea (arrangements), Judith Walsh White's Winnie the Pooh (arrangements), and 20-minute musical The Advice Column. Music direction credits include HeavyHead (asst. M.D.), Fly By Night, Mr. Burns, Formerly Known (arrangements), and The Cherry Orchard. A native of the Washington, D.C. area, Michael is a graduate of Vassar College (B.A., Music and Greek & Roman Studies) and recently received his M.F.A. in Musical Theatre Writing from N.Y.U. Tisch.
The Karaoke Killerettes
Book and Lyrics by Jeremy Desmon
Music by Jeff Thomson
When a group of determined moms is deemed "too old" to compete on the hit TV singing competition American Starmaker, they take matters into their own hands, armed with nothing but their voices, a few arcade game guns, and a refusal to be ignored. What follows is a hilarious, high-energy ride where these women fight for their moment in the limelight, proving that age is just a number when you have talent, passion, and a little mischief up your sleeve.
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Jeremy Desmon is an award-winning writer whose stories have played on stages throughout the world. The Girl in the Frame earned him the Edward Kleban Prize and Pump Up the Volume, his rock musical based on the 1990 Christian Slater film, was at LA’s Hudson Theatre in June, 2025. The Last Supper, a darkly comic, politically-charged new musical recently completed its out-of-town run starring Tony Award-winner Alex Newell. Other credits include the Goodspeed Musicals “revisal” of Good News, The Oliver Experiment, The Ladies Quick: Family is Murder, One Hit Wonder and two brand-new holiday extravaganzas, now available for licensing: The Dreidel Players Present: Best Hanukkah Show Ever and the Christmas jukebox musical comedy, What A Wonderful World. Additionally, Mr. Desmon has written countless touring spectacles, theme park extravaganzas and ice shows for the under-five set, featuring every Paw Patrol pup, Disney Princess, big-eared mouse, Baby Shark, furry red monster, curious monkey and magical little pony you can imagine — not to mention multiple editions of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus. At Dramallama, he’s known for his modern, imaginative comedies for high schools, including Andie Fowler's Big-Time Bucket List, Social Media v, Humanity, How to Write a Play (In 11 Easy Steps), and We Need to Talk About Your Kid. Jeremy is an alum of Stanford University, has an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and is in his seventeenth year teaching a Musical Theatre Writing workshop at Princeton University. He resides in Manhattan with his wife and four-year-old nugget, Anderson. They live down the street from that Starbucks.
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Jeff Thomson is a composer whose work spans theatre and film. A recipient of the Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation Award, the Dramatist Guild Musical Theatre Fellowship, and the Dottie Burman Award, His original musical Trails, produced by Kate Cannova Productions, has been performed internationally, earning the NYMF Award for Best Musical Score and the Stage Entertainment Development Award. Jeff’s upcoming and recent projects include a stage adaptation of Darren Stein’s Jawbreaker, a rock musical adaptation of the 1990 film Pump Up the Volume, and original works such as The Oliver Experiment, The Karaoke Killerettes, and The Ladies Quick: Family Is Murder. He also collaborated on The Last Supper, adapted from the cult dark comedy film by Dan Rosen, and composed for My Little Pony Live, produced by Hasbro and Mills Entertainment. In addition, Jeff contributed two original songs to Jeremy Desmon’s jukebox musical One Hit Wonder, which is currently licensed through Broadway Licensing.
​With This Ring
Book and Lyrics by Michael Kaplan
Music by Sam Steere
Three couples are out to dinner, and the conversation has hit a wall. What will they talk about? They grasp feebly at different topics, until one of them realizes...they can talk about Sarah and Fred’s marriage that just blew up! Along the way, the perspectives clash as the couples bring their personal biases and own marital experiences to the storytelling and gossip. In other words, we have a song cycle punctuated by totally unreliable narrators.
Michael Kaplan wrote the three-act comedy, Love Town, which was produced by the Pewter Plough Playhouse in Cambria, California in 2009 and is published by Samuel French/Concord Theatricals. He created the musical revue, We’re Cancelling Cable (and other Empty Threats), which was produced by the SLO Repertory Theater in 2015 and is currently represented by Miracle or 2 Theatrical Licensing. His full-length musical, Danny Come Home, received local productions in 2017 (Cambria Center for the Arts) and 2018 (Coastal Awakenings Festival, San Luis Obispo). His two-act musical comedy, Foodies, received staged readings in both Dallas (through musicalwriters.com) and the Cambria Center for the Arts, and was selected for the 2024 Florida New Musicals Festival. Michael has also had songs performed at New Works cabarets staged by musicalwriters.com. Earlier in 2025, he released a cast album for his original revue, It Takes Two: Brand New Songs About Same Old Love.
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Sam Steere is a composer, songwriter, teacher, and performer from Springfield, Illinois. His show My Father’s Dragon won the Academy Reading Series Pitch Night through MusicalWriters.Com (Dec ’21). Sam’s music and lyrics have been featured by Hexagon (Washington’s Only Original Political Satire Musical Comedy Review) and cabaret performances in multiple states. He loves a good story song, has dabbled in opera, likes a bit of jazz in his coffee, but most of all, he loves finding that touch of wonder and kindness in the everyday. If it's set to music, all the better.
The Last Piece
by Shreya Jha
When a lost love becomes a distant memory, what do we do when those memories start to fade away? The Last Piece, a new Canadian musical, follows Amara, an elderly woman coping with her ex-husband Andrew's recent Alzheimer's diagnosis. When Andrew suddenly reappears in Amara's life, the two begin to re-hash their memories of their 20 year marriage, attempting to reconnect to their past and stall Andrew's worsening condition. As they recount the stories of their meeting and relationship, Amara is left to reckon with her unresolved feelings surrounding their split, and her fear of progressively losing the man she loved most. The Last Piece highlights the withstanding bond of love, the subjective nature of our recollections, and how much of ourselves are made up of the fragile memories we hold.
Shreya Jha is a Canadian-American composer-playwright and paediatrics resident at McMaster University. Her work highlights intersections between art and science. Notable credits include Statistics (2020 Adams Prize for Musical Theatre) Connections (2023 Trinity College Dramatic Society) 18 Palace Road (2024 Theatre Sheridan) The Last Piece Piece (2024 Hart House Theatre, 2025 SheNYC festival) and Two Left Feet (2025 Toronto Fringe) Shreya has worked with ensembles including the National Arts Centre Orchestra, the Rose Orchestra, the Can-Am trio, the New York Song Collective, and the Scarborough Philharmonic.
The Anything You Wish Antique Shop
Book and Lyrics by Noelle Donfeld
Music by Nathan Wang
Generous and kind, Adam has lived for a decade alone in his family’s enchanted antique shop, with only his “nanny”, the shop itself, as company. His mother, a totally self- absorbed witch, has kept him a contented prisoner by letting him give his customers anything they wish for whatever they can afford to pay. When a determined, lovely young woman wishes to work at the shop so that she can earn enough for a gold ring for her mother, their infatuation turns the enchanted shop from a benevolent “nanny” into a stern and threatening jailer, while calamitous spells hit the girl’s parents.
Playwright and lyricist, Noelle Donfeld, is a three-time semi-finalist at the Eugene
O’Neill Musical Theatre Project, and her musical, The Revolution of Betsy Loring, was
selected as the Tomorrow Project at Casa Manana Theatre. Other productions include:
Mita, the Magnificent! (one-year tour by Walnut Street Theatre); Puritanical! (Malibu
Playhouse, NoHo Arts Center and DOMA Theatre); Miss Vulcan 1939, (commissioned
by Red Mountain Theatre, Birmingham, AL - three seasons, also Actors Co-op Too);
Powder Puff Pilots (UC Irvine and HiTech Charter High School); Ghost-s (Stages
Festival, NMI; Lyric Theatre, L.A.; Skylight Theatre, L.A.); Squeak! (La Canada
Theatre); The Spark, Hannah Senesh (Pierson Playhouse and Theatre Building Chicago);
The Revolution of Betsy Loring (Casa Manana Theatre, Ft. Worth and Encore Theater,
Dayton, Ohio); Carjacked! (The Arts Center, Carroboro, NC); Twas, Cashman Center,
Las Vegas and Lyndall Finley Wortham Theatre (Stuart Ostrow producer); Shahrazad,
Heads or Tales? Theatre Museum at Covent Garden and LATC (for Playwrights Arena),
and Aesop, Carpenter Center. She has had other productions at Musical Theatre West
and Century City Theatre. Her first musical, Hands, written with Nathan Wang and
selected for Stages 2000, Theatre Building Chicago, is the reason she writes musicals.
Noelle is a member of the Dramatists Guild and ALAP.
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Nathan Wang is one of the most successful composers in Hollywood and Asian cinema. Prolific and versatile, he has written music for both Disney and Jackie Chan movies, a Steven Spielberg documentary, animated cartoons, operas, musicals, symphonies and more. Honors include both Fulbright and Rotary Ambassador scholarships to study post-graduate work in England. He was awarded a Singapore Grammy Award, as well as an Emmy for Best Arrangement of a Song for the award-winning Showtime show “Reefer Madness.” He won another Emmy for the documentary film “The Legend of Pancho Barnes and the Happy Bottom Riding Club” He collaborated with Hans Zimmer on the music for Steven Spielberg’s “The Last Days”, which won an Academy Award for best documentary. He was also commissioned to write operas for Los Angeles Opera, including one spearheaded by Artistic Director Placido Domingo. One of his many musicals, “Imelda” had a long run off-Broadway. Nathan has also been very involved in both the American and Chinese film industry, writing scores for various Jackie Chan movies: “Rumble in the Bronx,” “First Strike,” “Who Am I,” and “The Myth”. His many movie credits include “No Man’s Land”, “Guns and Roses” and “Inseperable” with Kevin Spacey and Daniel Wu. His musical theatre credits include “Imelda”, which ran for many weeks off-Broadway, He has also been a favorite musical director for many artists including B.D. Wong, Lea Salonga, Tia Carrere, Kristin Chenowith, Kristen Bell, and David Hyde Pierce. And his collaborators say there is no one more fun to work with.
