Anna K. Jacobs
Composer
Librettist
Lyricist
Anna is a Plays in Progress Mentor. Her mentor interests: musical storytelling, heightened worlds, hybrid forms, feminist narratives, song structure. Request Anna as a PIP Mentor.
“I’m a big believer in the notion that musical theater is a form and not an aesthetic. I don’t think a musical should sound any one way. Music is language that has the potential to convey equivalent amounts of meaning as text, and just as the lyrics and libretto of a musical are shaped by its world and characters, as well as the voice of its creators, so too is the music. I ask the same questions of a musical when I’m working as its creator as I do when I’m empowering another creator in the capacity of a mentor: What’s specific about it? What’s clear and what’s not clear? What’s making it need to be a musical? Being able to really see the thing you’re working on is perhaps the most critical piece to knowing where to take it next. Think of me as your spectacles.”
Anna K. Jacobs is a Jonathan Larson and Billie Burke Ziegfeld Award-winning composer, lyricist, and book writer. Her musicals include Teeth (NAMT, O’Neill; co-book & lyrics by Tony & Pulitzer winner Michael R. Jackson), POP! (Yale Rep, Pittsburgh City Theatre, Studio Theatre, etc), Anytown (George Street Playhouse), Harmony, Kansas (Diversionary Theatre), Echo (Musical Theatre Factory), and Stella and the Moon Man (Sydney Theatre Company/Theatre of Image). She also contributed music and lyrics to the multi-composer works, Witnesses (California Center for the Arts) and Letters to the President (Cooper Union), and penned the screenplay for The Real Gemma Jordan (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), which she is now adapting into a stage musical with composer-lyricist, Rob Rokicki. Currently, Anna and her playwright-collaborator, Anna Ziegler, are working on A House Without Windows, a new musical about the life and disappearance of child prodigy author, Barbara Newhall Follett, which was commissioned by Barbara Whitman Productions and Grove Entertainment, and recently seen as part of the Goodspeed Musicals 2022 Festival of New Musicals. She is also writing the book for a new musical adaptation for Disney Cruise Line Entertainment.
As an educator, Anna is passionate about helping the next generation of songwriters develop their voices and craft. She is the Founding Artistic Director of the New York Youth Symphony’s Musical Theater Songwriting Program, and has served on the faculties of the Institute for American Musical Theatre, Temple University, Mannes School of Music, and the Dramatists Guild Institute. From 2013-18, she facilitated the NYMF Songwriting Workshop.
Originally from Sydney, Australia, Anna has called Brooklyn home since 2006. www.annakjacobs.com