Brian Howrey (B. K. Howrey when the composer hat is on) was born and raised in Houston, Texas and studied music and theatre at Dartmouth College and the California Institute of the Arts. His music theatre pieces have been praised variously for their “Rube-Goldberg-like interplay” (Randy Braun, Backstage West), for being “strangely funny, surreal, thought-provoking and romantic” (Christopher Small, Triple F, the Fringe Guide), and for having “genuine echoes of Samuel Beckett” (Richard Scaffidi, Dramalogue).
Mary Brennan of the Herald, Glasgow, said of Howrey’s Clownfish Serenade:
On one level it’s gentle, silly, and seemingly slight. But as the pieces of action come together you realise this is a very shrewd take on such things as market forces, competition, tunnel-visioned ambition, and — outmoded concept! — co-operative venture for mutual benefit. This is intelligent, witty stuff with a sting in its tail.
And here are some notices about his play The Fairy Tale Engineers:
The fun of Howrey’s playful and heartwarming new work is unraveling the labyrinth of overlapping details that culminate in alternately tragic and happy endings.
Les Spindle, Backstage West
Howrey’s lyrical use of language illustrates that allegory doesn’t need to be explained - its world is true to itself. . . . exquisite, breathtaking sequences . . . RECOMMENDED.
Alison Merkel, L.A. Weekly
Sounds weird, right? Well, it is, but it’s also wise, funny, and touching. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I loved it enough to see it twice, and weeks later, I’m still discovering new subtleties, complexities, and layers of meaning. Brian Howrey has written a unique and mysterious work, and a delightful musical score that sometimes sounds a bit like “Johann Sebastian Bach meets Loony Tunes.”
Ted Flagg, The Pink Sheet
Brian’s work has been performed at a variety of venues in the U.S. and abroad, including Theater of Note in Los Angeles, the Trap Door Theatre in Chicago, the Moray House Kabaret on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and the Kitchen, WAX and HERE in New York City. He has received individual grants from the Belle Foundation for Cultural Development and the Puffin Foundation, and he was nominated for the late, lamented L.A. Weekly’s Theatre Award for playwriting for The Fairy Tale Engineers.
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This is a phantom song, meaning, I wrote it thinking it might fit into a show, and I haven’t found a place for it yet. I keep a stash of these. This one, however, was part of a demo some folks at Disney asked me for. It got as far as them listening to it and liking it.
The singers are Meaghan Boeing and John Michael Morgan.
No, it didn’t get made.
A play with music. Performed in L.A. in 2002 and nominated for several of the late, lamented L.A. Weekly’s Theatre Awards. An unfinished fairy tale wants to end, turning upside down the lives of some time-hopping, polyamorous puppeteers.
Here’s the first entr’acte:
Because many of my shows have consisted of multiple, shorter theatre-pieces with music, I wrote this to go in between some of those moving parts:
‘Deviates’ in that second title is a verb. This theatre-piece with music was performed in New York at HERE in 2004 and again at the Kitchen in 2005. A mute, water-starved mermaid reliant on a bound, blindfolded servant to keep her lubricated suffers complications due to a battle between a potted-geranium wielder and a woodland nymph, whose music sounds like this:
From ‘Apprentice and Sorcerer Trip on the Light Fantastick’, a theatre-piece with music performed at the Rarig Center in Minneapolis in 2010. A clever apprentice helps an ineffectual sorcerer defeat the devil (?), leading to this rhumba:
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