ASCAP members David Javerbaum and Ken Stone have been named recipients of the 15th Annual Kleban Awards. Javerbaum received the award for most promising musical theater lyricist, and Stone received the award for most promising librettist.
The Kleban Foundation was established in 1988 under the will of Edward L. Kleban, best known as the Tony® and Pulitzer Prize award winner for the musical A Chorus Line. The will made provision for two annual Awards, each in the amount of $100,000 payable over two years, to be given to the most promising lyricist and librettist in American Musical Theater. The judges making the final determination this year were Julia Jordan, Michael John Lachiusa, and Jeffrey Sweet.
DAVID JAVERBAUM has won four Emmys, an additional Emmy nomination, two Peabody Awards, and Television Critics Awards for Best Comedy and Best News Show for his work as Writer and (since 2003) Head Writer and Supervising Producer of Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He is one of the primary authors of that show's 2004 textbook parody America (The Book), which spent fifteen weeks at #1 on The New York Times Bestseller List and was named Publishers' Weekly's Book of the Year; the audiobook won a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album. He has also been Emmy-nominated for his work as a writer for The Late Show with David Letterman. He spent three years writing for the satirical newspaper and website The Onion, conceiving its 1999 New York Times #1 bestseller Our Dumb Century and contributing numerous articles to it and two other Onion books. His work in musical theater includes writing the lyrics for the upcoming Broadway adaptation of John Waters' film Cry-Baby. He also wrote the lyrics and co-wrote the book for Suburb, which ran Off-Broadway in 2001 and was nominated as Best Off-Broadway Musical by the Outer Critics Circle, the Lucille Lortel Awards, and the Drama League (for which it was nominated as Best Musical, Broadway or Off-). He is an alumnus of NYU's Graduate School of Musical Theater Composition and Harvard University, where he wrote for the humor magazine The Harvard Lampoon and co-wrote two of that school's Hasty Pudding musicals. He lives in Manhattan with his wife Debra and their daughter Kate. His hobbies include the succinct encapsulation of his achievements.
KEN STONE is a bookwriter and lyricist in musical theater. He and composer Jan Powell have had a 20-year collaboration and have written Overland, Trask & Fenn, and King of the Cowboys, among numerous other shows. Ken has enjoyed a long relationship with Theatre Building Chicago and the Academy for New Musical Theatre in Los Angeles, both under the artistic direction of John Sparks. Ken's works have been funded by grants and commissions from the Frederick Loewe Trust, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New Tuners Theatre. He has won a Jefferson Citation nomination for new work (Chicago); an award from the Columbia Entertainment Company; and the grand prize in the American Musical Theatre Festival. Ken is a long-time member of the Dramatists Guild and ASCAP, and the winner of numerous ASCAP Special Awards. Two of his shows, The Legend of Tom Dooley and Cashel Byron's Profession, have been developed at the North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly, MA. Everyday Heroes, written for the Jeremiah People, toured for eight months in Canada and throughout the United States. His work has also been performed at TheatreWorks, La Mirada Civic Light Opera, Los Angeles Theatre Center, and the National Alliance for Musical Theatre. Stone and Powell's show American Tales is scheduled for its world premiere in October 2005 at the Antaeus Company in North Hollywood, CA, and will include the one-act musical Bartleby, the Scrivener (based on the story by Herman Melville). Act I of this double bill will be previewed on May 14-15 at the NoHo Theatre & Arts Festival, presented by the Antaeus Company at the New Place Studio in North Hollywood. A UCLA theater graduate, Ken is the Information Systems Manager for a Santa Monica law firm.
