19 May Guest Blog |Becca Anderson, Writer & Musical Theatremaker
Our new grants and mentoring scheme, KSF Artists of Choice, is open for applications from 1 – 29 May to UK and US artists across the disciplines of dance, theatre, musical theatre, music and film. Over the next few weeks, we will post guest blogs from some of our previous grant winners about how they used and were impacted by their KSF grant.
Name | Becca Anderson
Project | Academia Nuts
Year Awarded KSF Grant | 2014
We’ve all been there. We’ve all had a vision or a crazy idea that we knew would work if we could just pull all the pieces together to make it happen. In September of 2010, my collaborators Dan Marshall and Julian Blackmore and I, Becca Anderson, had one of our visions.
Skip forward three years, a writing residency, two concert presentations, six table reads, and seven full drafts to the spring of 2014. We’d been invited to present Academia Nuts in the New York Musical Theatre Festival in a gorgeous theatre right on 42nd Street. In addition to making sure our script and score were in tip top shape, we also now had to self-produce a professional production for paying audiences. It was a fantastic opportunity, but it wouldn’t be easy.
We needed a name director at the helm to garner any sort of industry attention if we were going to keep the show moving forward after the festival. More importantly though, we needed someone we knew understood our vision and loved our work. Enter Thomas Caruso.
Mr. Caruso was working on Broadway as the Associate Director of Matilda when we started working together on Academia Nuts. Before that he had worked on Ghost and Mamma Mia! In addition to his plentiful experience and industry know-how, Mr. Caruso brought with him charm, wit, and the energy of a true leader, inspiring every single person working on our team to do their utmost best work on the show.
The full budget for our production was daunting to look at, but when broken into specific pieces, it became more manageable. We looked at each item and thought through ways to fund every step of our journey. When looking at the most important item - our director - we knew we wanted to ask the KSF for support.
Fortunately, we must have done something right in our application, because KSF came through with a grant to cover Mr. Caruso’s fee, pension, and health insurance, and a huge weight was lifted from our shoulders. We are quite confident that the prestige that came with earning a KSF grant helped us to get the attention of the other funders for our show, and that without the KSF grant we might very likely have not received any further grants from additional funders.
Thankfully, after securing our full funding, the production went off without a hitch! We got some rave reviews, played for sold out houses at each of our performances, and Academia Nuts even won some awards including Best New Musical and Best Director at the festival!
Because of the success of our very first production, we are now in talks for future productions of Academia Nuts, we continue to work closely with Mr. Caruso on the show as well as other projects, and we even signed with agents! We’ve been invited to write more shows for theatre groups across the country and have been guest speakers and artists from New York to Honolulu all thanks to our first production and to the KSF.
If you have a project you believe in, be proud to ask for help to make it happen. Your art is incredible and should be seen and heard. Maybe you aren’t famous. Maybe you haven’t had a big success yet. But maybe you will! Believe in yourself and others will start to believe in you, too. My team asked for KSF to believe in us, and sure enough they did, and it made a world of difference. We had a hit, and we’re excited to keep working to make more hits. The Kevin Spacey Foundation grant we received was a huge part of that, and this great organization continues to help emerging artists year after year. Applying to be a KSF Artist of Choice could be the thing that catapults you to the next phase of your creative career. Don’t let that chance slip by. Grab it!
Find out more about Academia Nuts here.