The Kleban Foundation has announced the recipients of its 32nd annual Kleban Prize for Musical Theatre. This year’s two recipients are Dramatists Guild member César Alvarez, who was awarded the Kleban Prize for Most Promising Musical Theatre Lyricist, and Isabella Dawis, who was awarded the Kleban Prize for Most Promising Musical Theatre Librettist. Each winner will receive a $100,000 award, prsented virtually on February 21 on Broadway on Demand. 

Alvarez is a composer, lyricist, playwright, and performance maker. They create large experimental musicals as non-normative possibility spaces for embodiment, inter-dimensionality, socio-political transformation, kinship and coexistence. With a background as a jazz saxophonist, band leader and sound artist, César's work inhabits a space between the worlds of theater, music, performance art and social practice. César is a 2018-20 Princeton Arts Fellow and a recipient of The Jonathan Larson Award. César is an Assistant Professor of Music at Dartmouth College.