Recipients of the 2008 awards include Gaby Alter, Susan DiLallo, Joel New, Jason Rhyne, Jeff Thomson and Jordan Mann, who will each receive an individual artist award as well as a cash gift ranging from $5,000-$10,000. Pittsburgh's City Theatre will receive an organization award in support of the development of the new musical An Infinite Ache, which was penned by previous Larson Award winners Brendan Millburn and Valerie Vigoda.
Joe Calarco, Michael John LaChiusa, David Loud and Stephen Schwartz selected the winners from over 200 applicants.
Winners of the Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation Awards are being honored at a Feb. 14 luncheon at 21 Club. A host of Broadway favorites — including Neil Patrick Harris, Norm Lewis, Michael McElroy, Megan McGinnis, Anthony Rapp, Ann Sanders, Amy Spanger, and Mary Testa — are scheduled to be part of the afternoon, which will feature songs written by 2007 award winners Matt Gould, Melissa Li and Abe Rybeck, Robert Maddock, J. Oconer Navarro, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, and Mike Pettry.
The foundation is named for Jonathan Larson, the late composer of the Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Rent. For more information visit www.jlpaf.org
* The Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation was created in 1996 to "provide financial assistance and encouragement to emerging composers, lyricists and bookwriters, and to nonprofit theatres with a commitment to the development of new musical theatre works written in part or full by past individual Larson grant recipients."
