Brian Yorkey

Brian Yorkey is an American playwright, lyricist, and theatre director. He shared the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2009 Tony Award for Best Original Score with composer Tom Kitt, and was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical for Next to Normal.

A native of Issaquah, Washington, Yorkey graduated from Columbia University, where he served as the artistic director of the Varsity Show. He also is an alumnus of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop.

Prior to bringing Next to Normal to Broadway, Yorkey was affiliated with Village Theatre, where he began as a KidStage student and eventually progressed to a six-year tenure as associate artistic director. Five musicals written by Yorkey - Funny Pages (1993), Making Tracks (2002), The Wedding Banquet (2003), Play it by Heart (2005), and A Perfect Fall (2007) - were staged there.

Next to Normal began as a ten-minute-long piece called Feeling Electric recent college graduates Yorkey and Kitt wrote as a final project for the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop at the end of the 1990s. Their inspiration was a segment about electroconvulsive therapy Yorkey saw on Dateline NBC. Yorkey has observed it's "exponentially harder to write an original musical. Musicals that go wrong can be ridiculous because it’s a ridiculous art form. People bursting into song can be ridiculous. But musicals that go right can be sublime."

Yorkey is currently writing Untitled Fashion Musical for Paramount and Parkes McDonald, in collaboration with Shaiman and Wittman. His screenplay Love Undercover is set up at Overture with Pandemonium producing. He also scripted Sluts for Lionsgate Films and co-created the series The Bears Next Door for the Logo Network. Brian’s first feature film pitch, Time After Time, sold in a bidding war for high six figures to Universal. He is also working with English singing legend Sting on a piece of musical theatre based on Sting's seminal masterpiece "The Soul Cages" Page text.

In August 2010, Tom Kitt and Yorkey's musical In Your Eyes was workshopped at the Village Theatre's Festival of New Musicals in Issaquah, Washington (they also workshopped Feeling Electric there as well). The show is about "The students of Lakeshore High School are sent into a full-blown lock down (not to mention a flood of animosity, fear, and insecurity) when a plot of gun violence is suspected. As a group of unsupervised students attempts to make sense of the chaos, they end up learning more about themselves and their classmates—from the troubled rocker spitting lyrics, to the sarcastic fashionista pointing fingers from her pedestal."

External links

• Brian Yorkey at the Internet Broadway Database
• Interview with Brian Yorkey on MyNorthwest.com