WritingMusicalTheatre.com is an online curriculum dedicated to the study of the craft of writing for musical theatre. For playwrights, composers, lyricists, and theatre artists creating new musical theatre.
Individual courses offered include Lyric Lab, Advanced Lyric Lab, Outlining Lab, Prosody Lab, Metaphor Lab, Verse/Chorus/Refrain Lab, and Songwriting Lab - with more labs coming soon.
For information on individual labs, check the details below.

Take one course, for free. We've selected THE VERSE from the Lyric Lab as a representative sample of our courses. Enroll for free. See two videos, print out three handouts, take an interactive test, and see a sample of the kind of assignments you would complete for one-on-one feedback with the instructor.

A comprehensive online course on the craft of writing lyrics for musical theatre. Taught at the Academy for New Musical Theatre for a half-decade, this popular course is lead by ANMT's Lyric Lab Instructor, Scott Guy. It features topics such as Rhyme, Alliteration, The Verse, Chorus, Refrain, Prosody, Progression, Structure, and Song Spotting.

In this practical Lab, you will be lead step-by-step through the process of developing a musical idea from concept through to a working outline, with detailed constructive feedback along the way from your evaluator. By the end of this ten-unit course, you should have a well-developed and detailed outline that will solidly prepare you for the collaborative task of writing your new musical.
Lab author Elise Dewsberry says An outline can be an invaluable writer's tool for clarifying the structure and story arc of a musical idea. It can then serve as a blueprint for the rough draft that the collaborators will use to develop the new musical. Writers who skip this important step in the development process are likely to find themselves bogged down with a partially written new show that is riddled with logical inconsistencies, and does not compellingly deliver the intentions of the creative team.
Don't start writing until your outline is rock solid!

The Advanced Lyric Lab is for graduates of the Lyric Lab, and covers additional topics such as Character Through Diction, Linear Prosody, Conversational Prosody, Additional Progressions, Metaphor, Simile, List Songs and Twist Songs.

A self-contained unit focuses on metaphor and simile in musical theatre lyrics, and continues with advanced metaphorical concepts such as synecdoche, allegory, metonymy, periphrasis, apostrophe, mixed metaphor and parable. Historically offered as part of the Advanced Lyric Lab, this unit is available as a stand-alone for the very first time.

The foundation of lyric writing: Prosody, or matching the stresses of mysic with stresses in the lyric. Topics include Bad Prosody, Repairing Prosody, Linear Prosody, Euphony, and Poetic Meter versus Spoken and Musical Meter. Historically offered as part of the Lyric Lab, this unit is offered as a stand-alone for the very first time.

A comprehensive study of the Verse, the Chorus and the Refrain, and how they're used in musical theatre. Trace each structure historically, examine them in contemporary literature, and write your own examples of each.

Focus on a single song, rather than an entire musical. Professional feedback and advice on an opening number, for example, or a comic duet in the Second Act. Focus will be on the storytelling aspect of the song, and how the music and lyric illustrate the emotional content and subtext of the character who is singing.