THE VIOLET HOUR

Music by Will Reynolds | Book & Lyrics by Eric Price
Based on the play by Richard Greenberg

“It’s a sort of glow,

Neither pink nor blue,

But a violet the sky hides away. And you somehow know

It was made for you.

Your reward for surviving the day.”

“The Violet Hour” | Title Track Lyrics

ABOUT *THE VIOLET HOUR*

The dazzle, wit, and romance of the Jazz Age comes to life in this tuneful and emotionally stirring new musical by the award-winning team of Will Reynolds and Eric Price, based on the play by Tony Award-winner Richard Greenberg.
The story is set on April 1, 1919, when John Pace Seavering, a young publisher, comes to possess a machine which inexplicably begins printing pages from books. Book from the future. Page by page, John pieces together a vision of what the next century has in store for himself, his friends, and the world at large. And once he decides he wants to change the future, the clock is ticking.

Meet the creators

Will Reynolds (Music) and Eric Price (Lyrics and Book) won the 2018 Fred Ebb Award for Musical Theatre Writing and have been collaborators for the past fifteen years.

They have written the musicals The Violet Hour, Radioactive, Around the World, and The Sixth Borough. They’re also songwriters on the AppleTV+ animated series Central Park. In 2020, they were the recipients of a Lotte Lenya Award from the Kurt Weill Foundation.

THE CREATORS

Will Reynolds

MUSIC
www.willreynoldsonline.com

WILL REYNOLDS is a writer, performer, teaching artist, and the recipient of the Fred Ebb Award for musical theater writing with collaborator Eric Price. Will and Eric’s musicals include The Violet Hour (based on the play by Richard Greenberg), Radioactive, Around the World, and The Sixth Borough. You can hear their songwriting on Season Two of Central Park on Apple TV+, as well on the album Artists in Residence where their song “When I See You Again” is sung by Laura Osnes.

His song cycle Poems & Moon Songs has been produced as part of the Lincoln Center Songbook Series, and the song “Tavern” (text by Edna St. Vincent Millay) was featured on 6-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald’s album Go Back Home. Will is the composer/creator of The Greenwood Tree (based on the Sonnets by Shakespeare), with the song “Sigh No More, Ladies” featured on Nikki Renèe Daniels’ debut album, Home. His short musical The Whole World is Watching was a commission by Marymount Manhattan. Development opportunities include the Dramatist Guild Fellowship, Rhinebeck Writer’s Retreat, Goodspeed Writer’s Colony, The Musical Theater Factory, and the Johnny Mercer Songwriters Project.

Acting credits include: Emma (streamingmusicals.com), Daddy Long Legs (Off Broadway, directed by John Caird), Passion at Classic Stage Company (directed by John Doyle, cast album on PS Classics), Tony Kushner’s The Illusion (Signature Theater, directed by Michael Mayer), Emma at the Old Globe, Love Story at the Walnut Street Theatre, Big River at Goodspeed, A Room with a View at Seattle’s Fifth Avenue, and the North American Tour of Mamma Mia! Film: Emma (streamingmusicals.com), The Good Shepherd (directed by Robert DeNiro).
Will is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, and is currently on faculty at Pace University, Hussian College, MTCA (Musical Theatre College Auditions), and is co-founder of the musical theater educational online learning platform This MT Space.
Eric Price

BOOK & LYRICS
www.ericpriceonline.com

Eric Price has written the lyrics and book to the musicals The Violet Hour, Radioactive, Presto Change-o, Around the World, Hello Out There, The Sixth Borough, and additional material for the stage adaptation of the film Clue, which was the #1 most produced play in American schools during the 2019-2020 season. In addition, Eric’s musical adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma has been performed across the country in hundreds of productions.
With his collaborator Will Reynolds, Eric won the Fred Ebb Award for Musical Theatre Writing and the Lotte Lenya Award. They recently recorded a studio cast album for The Violet Hour starring Tony Award-winner Santino Fontana, Erika Henningsen, Jeremy Jordan, Solea Pfeiffer, and Brandon Uranowitz.
Two-time Tony nominee Laura Osnes recorded their song "When I See You Again," which was featured on the album Artists in Residence and released as a music video to commemorate the anniversary of the Broadway shutdown.
With Will Reynolds, Eric has written material for the Apple TV+ musical animated series Central Park starring Josh Gad, Leslie Odom Jr, Daveed Diggs, and Stanley Tucci.
Eric's work has been produced at theaters in New York, around the country, and in Europe. Production experience includes projects at such institutions as Manhattan Theatre Club, Roundabout Theatre, Goodman Theatre, The Kennedy Center, Menier Chocolate Factory, Barrington Stage, Symphony Space, Merkin Recital Hall, Minetta Lane Theatre, Audible.com, Joe's Pub, 54 Below (including solo show), Birdland, the Ravinia Festival, and more.
In addition to his career as a writer, Eric was the longtime assistant to 21-time Tony Award-winning director/producer Hal Prince and worked with him over the course of twelve years on the development of new musicals that premiered in New York, Chicago, Washington DC, London, and Tokyo.
He is a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab and has degrees in Directing from Indiana University and Musical Theatre Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Eric has been a Dramatists Guild Fellow, a four-time Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center finalist, and a member of Goodspeed’s Johnny Mercer Writers Colony and the Rhinebeck Writers' Retreat. He's been named a finalist for the Richard Rodgers Award, the Jonathan Larson Grant, and the Kleban Prize for both lyrics and libretto.
Eric is an Adjunct Professor of Musical Theatre at Pace University and Molloy College/CAP21 and is a member of The Dramatists Guild and ASCAP. With Will Reynolds, he is the co-founder of This MT Space, an online musical theatre education platform. He is represented by Michael Finkle at William Morris Endeavor.