Janine McGuire and Arri Lawton Simon are a NYC-based musical theatre writing team, members of the BMI Advanced Musical Theatre Writing Workshop, and alumni of the Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellowship program. Their original musical EXPRESS premiered in 2015 as a site-specific production at the New York Transit Museum, where it was performed inside a series of historic subway cars. EXPRESS was later expanded into a full-length immersive piece and received a workshop production at New York Film Academy in 2017. Later that year the team wrote the songs for the Theatre For Young Audiences musical KIBBY THE SPACE DOG, commissioned by the Wichita Children’s Theatre and Dance Center, which premiered in March 2018. They are currently adapting the 2006 film The Bubble by Eytan Fox & Gal Uchovsky for the stage as BORDERS, the story of two men, one Israeli and one Palestinian, who fall in love after meeting at a border checkpoint. BORDERS has been developed/incubated at the BMI Workshop, the Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellowship, Goodspeed Musicals, and New York Theatre Barn. Janine McGuire holds a B.A. in Music from Barnard College, Columbia University. Arri Lawton Simon holds a B.M. in Composition and Voice from Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University, is a 2014 recipient of the Jerry Harrington Award, and is an AEA performer. Collectively McGuire & Simon have written and produced concerts, stage musicals, plays, film scores, orchestral pieces, choral works, and custom songs in addition to teaching musical theatre and performing arts outreach in the community.
