Clay Zambo has been named by the York Theatre Company one of the musical theatre's "New, Emerging, Outstanding" composers; and his work is included in The Directory of Contemporary Musical Theatre Writers. The title song from Clay’s musical They Fly is listed among the Directory’s Top 25 songs.
His most recent project, Windjammers, written with Robin Share, enjoyed a summer-long run at Wisconsin’s American Folklore Theatre.
Recent work includes Blue Apron and Transit of Venus, a pair of one-act musicals commissioned for and premiered at Marymount Manhattan College.
Lost in Staten Island, produced at New York’s historic La MaMa ETC., is the third collaboration in Zambo and Richard Sheinmel’s “Modern Living” series; the previous installment, Post Modern Living, is now published by NYTheatre Express and indietheaternow.com.
Zambo and composer Scott Ethier’s anthem "A Mother's Carol" won American Composers Forum's Welcome Christmas choral-writing competition, was premiered by the Minneapolis-based choral ensemble VocalEssence on NPR, and is published by Boosey and Hawkes. Their musical Shlemiel Crooks (book by Sean Hartley and Bob Kolsby, based on stories by Anna Olswanger) was commissioned by NYC’s Kaufman Center.
Greenbrier Ghost (book by Susan Murray) was produced by Spirit of Broadway Theatre, is the winner of Academy for New Musical Theatre's Search for New Musicals, a finalist for BMI’s Jerry Bock Award, and was selected by Stephen Schwartz for the ASCAP/Disney Musical Theatre Workshop.
Clay’s music, lyrics, or arrangements have been heard Off-Off Broadway (Modern Living, Downtown Dysfunctionals, The Fall of Eve and Adam, The Woman); in nationally and regionally touring educational-theatre productions (Inside Broadway, National Theatre for the Performing Arts); and an audiobook (Forbidden Fruit). I Am Star Trek (Rick Vorndran, book; Scott Ethier, music) was produced at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and transferred to London. His work has been featured on NPR’s Car Talk. Many of his scores were commissioned for premiere at NYC’s Merkin Hall, including Yo, Jonah!, They Fly (a retelling of the myth of Icarus and Daedalus) and the Chanukah favorite, “The Ballad of Thomas the Shammus.”
A former faculty member at Carnegie-Mellon University and the Idyllwild Arts Academy in California, he currently teaches at the Lucy Moses School in Manhattan, music-directs productions for the Kaufman Center’s Poppyseed Players, and serves as Director of Music Ministries for Our Lady of Fatima Parish in Connecticut. A member of the BMI-Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop and the Dramatists Guild, he is an alumnus of Ohio University’s Honors Tutorial College.
Clay is also a pretty good cook, a fan of game shows, and a distance runner.
Clay Zambo
