Michael Friedman

Artist, Brainstormer, Gay, Idea generator, Musician, Performer, Writer/Editor

Michael Friedman wrote the music and lyrics for Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which recently completed runs at the Public Theater and on Broadway, and received Lucille Lortel and Outer Critics Circle Awards for Best New Musical and was featured on multiple top ten lists for 2010. He is a founding Associate Artist of The Civilians, and has been the Composer/lyricist for the company’s In the Footprint, This Beautiful City, [I Am] Nobody’s Lunch, Gone Missing, and Canard, Canard, Goose? He also wrote music and lyrics for Saved and The Brand New Kid. With Steve Cosson, he is the co-author of Paris Commune. His music was recently heard in the Signature Theatre's revival of Tony Kushner's Angels in America and in the Public Theater's production of Mr. Kushner's new play, The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. He was also the dramaturg for the recent Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun, directed by Kenny Leon. A 2009-2010 Barron Visiting Professor at the Princeton Environmental Institute, he is an Artistic Associate at New York Theatre Workshop, and a recipient of a MacDowell fellowship, a Meet the Composer Fellowship, and a Princeton University Hodder Fellowship. He received a 2007 Obie award for sustained excellence. Upcoming projects include Pretty Filthy, a musical about the adult film industry with the Civilians, an adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s novel, Fortress of Solitude, and commissions from Playwrights Horizons, the Huntington Theatre, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival. With Steve Cosson, he co-wrote Paris Commune, which was produced at the Public Theater in 2008 and will be produced at BAM in 2012. His music has also been heard at NYTW, the Roundabout, Second Stage, Soho Rep, Theater for a New Audience, Signature, and The Acting Company, and regionally at the Guthrie, The Huntington, La Jolla Playhouse, Hartford Stage, Humana Festival, ART, Williamstown Theatre Festival, and internationally at London’s Soho and Gate Theatres, and the Edinburgh Festival.