SOFONIZBA | MusicalTheatreResourceCenter

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SOFONIZBA
North Africa, 203 B.C.  Superpowers Rome and Carthage are at war. Roman General Scipio has found and financed the military recovery of MASSINISSA, the fugitive king of Numidia, overthrown by Carthage 15 years ago. Massinissa now marches to reclaim his capital from Carthage.  SOFONIZBA, a savvy Carthaginian princess, is dispatched by her father—Supreme commander of the Carthaginian army—to intercept, seduce, and impede Massinissa’s march, allowing her father time to reinforce the capital against him. Betrothed before Massinissa’s exile, their reunion rekindles the raw passions they alone arouse in one another. Authorities on both sides are right to worry.  The cross-purposes of these two conflicted passionate people may very well decide which empire, Rome or Carthage, will survive to rule the Mediterranean for the next thousand years…

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<a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lumQdLd3W0klhX6pAceDM-P0HFGw_K37/edit?usp=drive_link&ouid=105932690623748085540&rtpof=true&sd=true" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lumQdLd3W0klhX6pAceDM-P0HFGw_K37/edit?usp=drive_link&ouid=105932690623748085540&rtpof=true&sd=true   </a>
HISTORY of SOFONIZBA
I had always envisioned Sofonizba as a musical, but originally wrote it as a play.  It was the chance meeting and mentorship of Howlett Smith that propelled me past the limitations of my self-study in musical theater.

Sofonizba has had two concert readings, both performed at UCLA, before theater students and invited members of the Los Angeles Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop, circa 1987-9.  While the show was fairly well received, both readings provided Howlett and I a slew of sobering and helpful notes that would greatly inform our revisions in years to come.  Quite frankly, in the many intervening years, Howlett and I pretty much neglected Sofonizba as he worked to support his family, and I went off to film school and later pursued filmmaking.  When we finally reconvened, several years later, it was primarily to move on and compose new shows.

A phenomenal arranger with lush mid twentieth century sentimental tastes, Howlett ultimately came to recognize the need and value of us engaging an arranger with more cutting-edge sensibilities to compliment and enhance his gorgeous classically inspired compositions for 21st-century audiences.

That was 2014.  It would be three years before I’d find the full-flowered amalgam of influences I was looking for in a single individual. Jamaican born Boris “Franz” Richards is a classically trained R&B, Hip-Hop, and jazz arranger and studio engineer who, on a daily basis, facilitates the finesse of a wide range of musically styled recording artists.  He instantly fell in love with Howlett’s music. Where everyone else demanded a minimum $2500 a song, Franz—if not for his necessarily more prudent wife—might have paid us for the chance to do the work.

So, as dementia was increasingly diminishing the once formidable powers of my beloved composer, Franz was breathing new life into all of our works.  Howlett marveled at everything he heard from Franz, even as he needed reminding that they were all his own compositions. “Really?!” he’d laugh in amazement, joying in the discovery anew, each time.

When Howlett finally entered hospice, Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop founder & co-director John Sparks helped me hurry to mount a reading of Howlett’s & my In the Shadow of Zapata, at the City Club, Los Angeles (Click Link Above).  Quite fortuitously, Howlett passed the night before, fully enabling his Spirit to attend the festivities.

Covid would completely stall all further unveiling of our heretofore unknown works to the world.  Finally, in 2022, I submitted Sofonizba to the O’neil’s National Musical Theatre  Conference, where it made it to the semi-final round.  It is currently wending its way at NAMT.

From 2018 on into the early days of Covid, I studied Broadway Producing as a part of Ken Davenport’s TheaterMakers Inner Circle.  Meeting top performers, producers, designers, and investors has given me an appreciation for the risky, rugged yet fulfilling work producing can be.  I know our shows.  I know our audiences.

Our shows are admittedly large spectacle shows.  To that end, I’ve contemplated strategies to make mounting them less financially daunting.

BIOS: (biographies for the members of your team)

<h3 style="text-align: center">Howlett Smith</h3>
1933 - 2019
Howlett began studying music at the age of eight at the School for the Deaf and the Blind in Tucson, Arizona.  By age 14, he booked his first professional gig and worked professionally right up until he passed.                                                         His songs have been performed and recorded by Nancy Wilson, Andy Williams, Peggy Lee, Glenn Campbell, Karen Carpenter, Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gorme, and Spanky Wilson.
Howlett was one of the original members of the Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop, studying alongside Maury Yeston (Nine), Ed Kleban (A Chorus Line), and workshop founder and co-Director John Sparks.

Howlett went on to write several musicals and was the music director for the Broadway show “Me and Bessie,” which starred famed gospel and blues singer Linda Hopkins.

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Bobby Crawford
Book & Lyrics & Additional Music
Bobby is a playwright, screenwriter, lyricist and director of stage and film.  He is a product of Howard University (Owen Dodson Award—Best Play);  UCLA (Samuel Goldwyn Screenwriting Finalist); Catholic University of America (Best Director & Best Production); and the American Film Institute (Nominated Most Likely to Succeed at Cannes).

Bobby’s play The Brass Medallion won an Excellence in Playwriting Award from the American College Theater Festival, which made Bobby—at the time—the youngest person and first African American to have an original work produced in the Eisenhower Theater of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Bobby served on the staff of two comedy series, The New Odd Couple and 227 where NBC chairman Brandon Tartikoff selected lowly staff writer Bobby’s episode Honesty to premiere the series in place of the series Pilot episode.  Bobby later wrote the film, A Rage In Harlem, starring Forrest Whittaker, Danny Glover and Gregory Hines.

With his late partner, noted composer Howlett Smith, Bobby has penned three musical theater spectacles: Sofonizba; In the Shadow of Zapata; and Khubilai: Mothered to Manhood.

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