Theatre Now’s Astonishing! Gala 2025

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By Jack Quinn, Publisher, TheaterScene.net

On Saturday evening, November 8, 2025, beneath the chandeliers of The Players on Gramercy Park, Theatre Now New York held its Astonishing! Gala 2025: Celebrating Women & Nonbinary Musical Theatre Writers—a night that fused polish with purpose. Beneath portraits of Edwin Booth and Helen Hayes, a cross-section of Broadway’s creative heart gathered to honor three women reshaping the American musical: Mindi Dickstein, Lisa Lambert and Anna K. Jacobs.

Hosted with radiant humor by Taylor Iman Jones, the evening celebrated women and nonbinary musical theatre writers, with performances by Isabelle McCalla, Kyra Kennedy, Claire Kwon, Afra Sophia Tully, and Jones herself. Songs rose through the oak-paneled hall like light through stained glass. It wasn’t merely a gala; it was a handoff — the act of creation passing from one generation to the next.

Each honoree embodied the evening’s mission in a different key. Introducing Jacobs, Michael R. Jackson called her “a natural-born educator… warm, kind, human — and an utter pleasure to eat French fries with.”

Jacobs, the Australian-born Jonathan Larson Award winner whose musicals include Teeth; Pop!; Harmony, Kansas; and Anytown, spoke with gratitude about finding community in a new city.

“When I moved here in 2006, I didn’t know anyone,” she said. “Organizations like Theatre Now helped me find my footing and gave my voice a place to land.”

Her newest project, A House Without Windows (with playwright Anna Ziegler), reimagines the life of a vanished child prodigy turned lost author.

“I love that we’re in a moment when more women and nonbinary creators are finally being trusted,” she added.

That word — trusted — seemed to echo through the night.

If the honorees reflected artistry, Tom Morrissey, Theatre Now’s Producing Artistic Director, revealed the architecture holding it up.
“It takes a lot of work,” he said. “We’ve been developing one musical for five years — and that’s not unusual. Seven or eight is common.”

He spoke of the unseen cost of creativity.

“Readings are essential, but they don’t move a show forward. To really grow it, you need an audience — and that’s where the expenses start.”

Then, more softly:

“When you do a show, there are house people, designers, electricians, marketing teams — hundreds of hands making that curtain rise. And every night at eight o’clock, it does. No other industry meets its cue that perfectly.”

Morrissey knows every cue by heart. A lifelong man of the theatre, he began as a young dancer, trained at NYU’s Tisch School and with Stella Adler, then worked every side of the stage — box office, stage management, and production. He later managed the storied Village Gate and collaborated with Circle Rep and Naked Angels before devoting himself to new-musical development.

“It takes cash,” he added with a grin that’s clearly earned.

His realism grounded the night’s glamour in truth: musicals aren’t written; they’re rewritten — in time, money, and trust.

Among the Writers Lab’s rising voices is AriDy Nox, whose Black Girl in Paris reframes the story of Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who traveled with Thomas Jefferson to Paris and could have claimed her freedom.

“It’s about those two years — the freest of her life,” Nox said. “Her courage, her pursuit of freedom for her family.”

The score blends American rhythm with a splash of Parisian color — bold, cosmopolitan, and deeply human. Listening to her describe it, one could feel the living purpose of Astonishing! Gala 2025: Celebrating Women & Nonbinary Musical Theatre Writers — not preservation, but evolution.

Composer-lyricist Carrie Caffrey brought a practical lens to creativity. Her musical “Devil May Care” has a song Normal, Illinois which follows a young woman returning home after college, confronting both memory and constraint.

“Some workshops allow twenty performers; others, seven,” she said. “You keep reshaping until the story fits the room.”

Her score fuses gospel with punk rock. “A four-piece band can sound like a choir if it’s honest,” Caffrey said. Her blend of ambition and realism captured the Lab’s essence: artistry engineered for endurance.

For Jonathan Lynch, a founding member of the Writers Lab since 2019, community remains the real reward.

“My big project’s a traditional musical comedy called Miss Humanity,” he said. “A Miss Humanity pageant winner vows to stop a war — so her agent fakes one for her.”

He co-writes with Michael DiGaetano, a television veteran with sharp instincts. “He gives me structure; I give him chaos,” Lynch laughed. After six years, his conclusion was simple:

“It’s a one-stop shop. A fantastic community. I love it.”

If Jacobs and Lynch embodied the present and future, Mindi Dickstein grounded the evening in moral gravity.

Known for Little Women on Broadway, Dickstein is a Jonathan Larson Award winner whose works include Maiden Voyage, The Book of Saint Ex, and Witnesses — a song cycle drawn from the diaries of teenagers lost in the Holocaust.

In a quiet hallway moment, I asked what Witnesses had taught her. She paused before answering.

“You can’t tell that story enough,” she said. “Everyone knows it, and it still breaks your heart every time.”

Then, gently:

“There’s always someone, somewhere, doing something cruel to people who share nothing but race or religion. That’s why we keep telling it.”

At the cycle’s end, a mother imagines her daughter finally at peace. “It’s devastating — but somehow beautiful,” she said. Her words lingered — proof that remembrance can still sing.

If Dickstein reached for grace, Lisa Lambert reminded everyone that joy is its own courage.

Bob Martin introduced her with affection: “We met as tall, awkward teens at a Toronto drama school above a Burger King — more expensive than Yale.” From that unlikely start came The Drowsy Chaperone — and a Tony Award.

Lambert, whose credits span Slings & Arrows and other comedy projects, spoke of rediscovering momentum.

“When I did the Writers Lab, I got inspired again,” she said. “That’s saying something — I was very good at enjoying my free time.”

She called procrastination “the quietest battle every writer fights,” remembering how The Drowsy Chaperone’s signature number, “I Don’t Wanna Show Off,” began as an “I don’t do” song that became an “I do.”

“That’s what the Lab gave me again — that spark of I do.”

Before introducing “As We Stumble Along,” she smiled. “It’s half ridiculous and half sincere — and that’s musical theatre itself.”

Founded in 2013, Theatre Now New York has grown into one of the city’s most vital incubators for new musicals. It produces the Sound Bites 10-Minute Musical Festival, developmental readings, and the Musical Writers Lab, which has hosted master classes with Stephen Flaherty, Susan Birkenhead, Joe Iconis, Rachel Sheinkin, and Andrew Lippa.

Managing Director Erik Schark explained that Astonishing! Gala 2025: Celebrating Women & Nonbinary Musical Theatre Writers grew directly from those sessions. When Dickstein, Jacobs, and Lambert joined the advisory board, they recognized how few women had historically been honored in musical-theatre writing. The result was this gala — not only as tribute, but as infrastructure for equity.

“We wanted to celebrate these voices not just onstage,” Schark said, “but in the rooms where new musicals are born.”

What made Astonishing! Gala 2025: Celebrating Women & Nonbinary Musical Theatre Writers live up to its name wasn’t glamour — it was grace. The invisible scaffolding of mentorship, persistence, and shared belief gave the night its glow.

In the candlelit hall of The Players, surrounded by portraits of theatre’s forebears, Theatre Now reminded everyone that legacy isn’t inherited — it’s built. Line by line. Lyric by lyric.

For TheaterScene.net, nights like this redefine gala reporting — not a social diary, but a creative record.

Each honoree, each song, each quiet conversation carried the same message:

musical theatre isn’t merely surviving — it’s evolving, diversifying, and, as one lyric might say, learning to be astonishing once more.

Author’s Note:

Jack Quinn founded TheaterScene.net in 2001, nine days after surviving the 9/11 tragedy at Ground Zero. Seeking to focus on what’s great about New York rather than what had been lost, he built the site into one of the city’s longest-running theatre publications. Now in its 24th year, TheaterScene.net features the work of ten writers covering productions across the city, while Quinn’s own writing centers on the human stories behind the art — the quiet determination, humor, and heart that keep New York theatre alive.