Feinberg & Rose

The Oldenburg Suite, Doctor Glas: A Musical Play, Metropolitan, & More

We met back in the spring of 2017 at age 19 when were were approached to write a short musical film for a mutual friend of ours who was a director. We ultimately came up with The Eminent Carmine Craig, screenplay and lyrics by James and music by Matthew. The film went on to be an official selection at the Monarch, Grove, and Montclair Film Festivals. This project led to our long standing partnership of writing musicals for stage and screen together. In 2018, after The Eminent Carmine Craig, we immediately started working on two other projects. The first was Let’s Go to the Movies, another musical short commissioned by the Montclair Film Festival to promote the joy of going to the movies to their audiences. Our second project was a revamping of a stage musical James had previously written and produced called Boy Meets Girl. It had been previously produced in the United States and internationally, but we added additional songs and orchestrations for a premiere at New York Summerfest that summer.

In the fall of 2018, after both of those projects, we got to work on The Oldenburg Suite. Initially conceived of as a concept album/podcast musical, we took it to New York Musical Festival in the summer of 2019, where it had a sold-out run and won the award for best concert presentation. We then did a workshop at Montclair State University in January 2020 and began a thorough revision process. In 2022, a year which had already seen The Oldenburg Suite named a Richard Rodgers Award Finalist, we brought The Oldenburg Suite back to New York at Feinstein’s/54 Below, working with a list of incredible artists including Director Jen Wineman, Ben Roseberry, Nina White, Holly Gould, Ashley LaLonde, Lucille Lortel nominee Ben Steinfeld, 2021 Grammy nominee Austin Ku, singer-songwriter Lizzy McAlpine and more, for which it received multiple BroadwayWorld Cabaret Award nominations.

Later that year, we took our latest completed work, Doctor Glas: A Musical Play, based on the classic novel by Swedish author Hjalmar Söderberg, to New York University where it received development and a staged reading. A second reading was produced by Rose Caiola in 2023 starring Robert Cuccioli and Will Dagger.

We currently have two other musicals in development: the musical adaptation of the 1990 Academy Award nominated film Metropolitan, in collaboration with acclaimed director and screenwriter Whit Stillman, who will serve as co-bookwriter; and another currently unannounced project.

Our interest is the continued entwinement of the musical theater and operatic traditions; the primacy, in other words, of music as a unified storytelling device as opposed to a delivery system for individual “hits” or mimicry of contemporary pop styles. We feel that there is a thread of innovation which began with Rodgers and Hammerstein and reached its apotheosis in Sondheim but has been largely abandoned since – that is, the “musical drama” presented with the seriousness that straight drama has been afforded on the American stage over the past half-century. We believe the way forward for the musical is a focus on the internal, a focus on character and stories – on the same things that concerned, say, O’Neill or Williams as they sought to bring the American theater forward from melodrama.

Our aesthetics are guided by content; that said, most of our writing is rooted in pastiche of particular musical forms, styles, or eras. We enjoy playing with preconceptions and rearranging (with reverence) the pieces of genres to help our audiences understand them in new ways.