LYNN AHRENS
IWhen we first
met Lynn she was a secretary in the copy department at McCaffrey
& McCall. One day Tom and I noticed her carrying a guitar into
the office and asked her to play something. She sang us a song
she had written called, You're Just a Phase. It was a
gret concept with a wonderful melody. So we asked her if she'd
like to write a Schoolhouse Rock song. The result: A
Noun is a Person, Place or Thing. My favorites of the many
songs Lynn wrote for us are Interjections, Telegraph
Line, Three Ring Government and The
Preamble. Scores of people have told me they never
could have passed their high school Civics tests without humming
Lynn's song.
In
1982, Lynn attended the BMI Musical Theater Workshop, where she
met composer, Stephen Flarhety. That began
what has become a 20 year collaboration. Their
musical farce Lucky
Stiff, first produced off Broadway by Playwrights Horizons,
won the Richard Rodgers Award and Washington's 1990 Helen Hayes
Award as Best Musical.
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Lynn and Stephen are co-creators of
the hit Broadway musical Once on this Island,
which was awarded London's 1995 Olivier Award as Best Musical and received
eight Tony nominations, including Best Score and Best Book. In 1998,
they won the Tony Award, Drama Desk Award and Outer Critics Circle
Award for their score of Ragtime; they received two Grammy nominations
for Songs from Ragtime and Ragtime:
Original Broadway Cast Recording.
Also in 1998, Lynn and Stephen received two
Academy Award nominations and two Golden Globe nominations for the
songs and score of Anastasia, Twentieth Century Fox's first
feature animation. Lynn is also the lyricist and
co-book writer for A Christmas Carol, Madison Square Garden's
annual holiday musical broadcast this Christmas as a television special.
For more on Lynn (Yes, there's even more!),
check out her website.
http://www.ahrensandflaherty.com
Lynn will stop singing if you click here:
Links to more of the people who've helped create Schoolhouse Rock
Return to George's Schoolhouse Rock page
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