Irena: The Musical, a new work by creative team Megan Cavallari and Kait Kerrigan, has advanced to the semi-finals for the 2024 Pipeline Arts Foundation. Our musical, telling the story of Holocaust heroine Irena Sendler’s defiance of Nazi Jewish aggression, is making strides. We are thrilled to be considered for this development opportunity.
Megan Cavallari and Kait Kerrigan at the Irena First Look
The cast & crew of "Barbie as the Princess and the Pauper" reunited for the film's 20th anniversary for The Tammy Tuckey Show on January 12th, 2024!
Exciting news! ‘The Hyperions’ can now be streamed on HBO Max! I had the pleasure of writing the song 'Joie de Vivre' for this film alongside two incredibly talented musicians, Oumi Kapila and Anthony Cormican. Oumi invited me to this project, and it was an absolute joy to work on. Don't miss out on this fantastic movie and its excellent soundtrack. “Joie de Vivre” can be found on the Spotify soundtrack - track 33! Listen here!
I found this fantastic review of my work for 2004’s Barbie as the Princess and the Pauper that I wanted to share!
“[the film has] hummable tunes with clever lyrics, fine characters and a scathing indictment of the inequities of the feudal system” … “[it is] the “Citizen Kane of the [children’s film] genre.”
- James Lileks of the Wyoming Star Tribune
Composer Megan Cavallari has recently become a contributing writer to the online magazine TheDrillMag.com. Check out her first article wherein she discusses how she discovered and thrived in the music industry despite life’s challenges.
“I learned, at an early age, that I was a connector and composing was the ultimate connection. To work at the optimal level, I had to learn to compose original, authentic music in every style, while staying on course, and most importantly: make the jump to ‘light speed’ on any given day.” - Megan Cavallari
When you hear the words “functional drug addict,” you tend to picture an adult — the physician quietly prescribing pharmaceuticals to himself, the cashier powering through a shift on amphetamines, the stay-at-home mom who gets by each day by getting stoned. But in “Sno Babies,” Kristen (Katie Kelly), a bright and beautiful 16-year-old whose life is a whirlwind of AP classes and gossip-girl niches and hip-hop parties, shoots heroin into the vein underneath her tongue. The sheer cringe factor aside, we recognize that the reason that she and her friend, the bad-news dark angel Hannah (Paola Andino), choose this particular method is so they won’t have to hide the track marks.
When the drug hits Kristen’s bloodstream, she sinks back into the pillow in a rush that’s so blissfully debilitating it all but knocks her out. (The music we hear is a slowly crashing rhapsody.) But once she comes down, she’s her old perky, friendly self. Heroin, says Kristen, “makes me who I wish I was,” and while that line echoes the sentiments of a thousand heroin addicts, as phrased it has a distinctly aspirational Age of Kardashian wannabe decadence. It’s the casualness of the drug use, extreme yet just another part of life, that’s the 2020 element. Kristen wants to have her dope and eat it too. And that means turning herself into an invisible junkie.
For a while, “Sno Babies” has a mood of tranquil suburban dread that reels you in. Kristen is a girl with everything — a nice family, a good school, a safe neighborhood — but we can believe in her addiction, because she has grown up in a world that’s taught her to live for pleasure, the more reckless the better. The first drug she took was OxyContin, but those pills, as she explains, are expensive ($80 a pop), and heroin costs $10 a bag and gives you a better high. She buys designer brands of dope with names like Die Hard 9 and Lucifer from people like Jeff (Niko Terho), who’s like the cocky young Tom Cruise as an upscale high-school drug salesman. When Kristen and Hannah are high, they think they’re living the dream, and “Sno Babies” is “Requiem for a Dream” as a YA soap opera.
But the director, Bridget Smith, and the screenwriter, Mike Walsh, in trying to craft a cautionary tale (a fine ambition, though has there ever been a heroin drama that wasn’t a cautionary tale?), have concocted a plot that’s an unwieldy pile of too-muchness. And it undercuts the authenticity of the mood and the acting. It’s clear that the filmmakers didn’t want to make another getting-high-and-hitting-bottom-and-going-to-rehab-and-relapsing-and-recovery 12-step parable. But what they’ve given us instead is a vaguely faith-based tale infused with enough melodrama to fuel three luridly didactic Afterschool Specials.
Kristen and Hannah are heroin besties. They’re on top of the world until Kristen, nodded out in a bedroom, gets raped by Brandon, the one who first introduced her to drugs. She becomes pregnant — and continues to shoot heroin. Her older friend, Valerie (Meryl Jones Willliams), is pregnant. Her mother (Shannan Wilson), a real-estate broker, is trying to sell a home to a couple who are trying, with a desperate lack of success, to become pregnant.
The heavy-handedness of the pregnancy theme is the tip-off that the movie has an agenda. Kristen tries to hide her pregnancy as surely as she hides her addiction, an attempt doomed to fail. Or so you’d think.
There’s a creepy scoring-dope-in-the-hood scene (Dominic Costa, as the drug dealer Crossover, casts a spell), and a harrowing cold-turkey episode full of crying and retching and whining and dreading. But then “Sno Babies” arrives at a scene so preposterous that the film never recovers from it. Kristen, having gotten herself clean, has gone with her mother to a coffee shop to finally tell her about the pregnancy. Just as she’s working up the courage to spill the beans, she spies Hannah. It’s a schlocky movie coincidence — but the jaw-dropping part arrives when Kristen excuses herself to go to the bathroom, and as she removes her jacket we see that she’s now got a baby bump. And her mother hasn’t noticed it. She’s supposed to be Too Preoccupied With Her Career. But come on! From this point forward, Kristen literally seems to get more pregnant with every minute of screen time.
And then comes a subplot with a truly terrifying twist — terrifying because it’s so godawful. Matt (Michael Lombardi), the husband in the couple who can’t seem to get pregnant, is the co-owner of the Shiloh Nature Reserve, a valuable property inherited from his father. He becomes obsessed with the coyote that’s been running wild, and even after he and his sister sell the land, he — and the movie — remain fixated on the coyote. Why? I won’t spoil it, but suffice to say that it’s the kind of plot convolution that can spoil your day. Especially in a drug drama that started off looking like you could take it seriously.
Link:
https://variety.com/2020/film/reviews/sno-babies-review-katie-kelly-1234789977/
Carrie Manolakos stars in the title role of this first-look benefit performance of IRENA, a new musical by Megan Cavallari (The Game, Hot Shoe Shuffle) and Kait Kerrigan (The Mad Ones, The Bad Years), directed by Jonah Platt (Dog Sees God) at Temple Emanuel Beverly Hills on January 26th (7pm) & 27th (1pm). Proceeds from the event will go toward the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.
IRENA musicalizes the true story of Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker during World War II who rescued more than 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto and preserved their original identities in jars that she buried in her yard. Where others stood by in fear, Irena was compelled to risk her life, proving that there is nothing more powerful than a determined - and underestimated - woman. With a lush melodic score, IRENA is a timely story of feminism, radical empathy, and doing right in the face of unspeakable wrong. Irena's heroism earned her the title of "Righteous Among the Nations" by the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, but her passion and rebellion are what make her a force to be reckoned with on the stage.
Carrie Manolakos (Wicked, Mamma Mia!) leads an all-star cast that includes Caitlin Ary(Westside, For the Record: Baz), Carly Bracco (Peter Pan, Grease Live), Laura Dickinson(three-time Grammy winner, Phineas & Ferb), Wilkie Ferguson (Motown, Porgy & Bess), Michael Scott Harris (Phantom of the Opera), Doug Kreeger (Les Miserables, For the Record: Love Actually), Ilysia Pierce (cantor at Temple for the Arts), Zak Resnick (Mamma Mia!, For the Record: Scorsese), Nick Sacks (Dear Evan Hansen, The Bad Years), Nickie Scates (Hair, Company), Hayley Shukiar (A Christmas Story Live, Dance Baby Dance), Bella Stine (Cartoon Network's Peanuts, Cucuy the Boogeyman), and Mitchell Wray (Finding Neverland). The event is stage managed by Amy Francis Schott & Sam Sherry.
The evening will be conducted by maestra Noreen Green (conductor of the LA Jewish Symphony), with Grammy Award-winning violinist Jeremy Cohen playing first chair with a live string quartet.
Tickets are available for purchase at http://tebh.org/irena.
...Megan Cavallari has already reached many artistic milestones, having moved from her native Philly to Hollywood, where she makes her living as a film composer, and having gone vegan six years ago. She's worked with and learned from icons like Jerry Goldsmith and Danny Elfman (she was part of the team working on The Nightmare Before Christmas) and uses her mainstream paychecks to finance labor-of-love independents, such as an upcoming operetta / tone poem with a working title of "Three Pigs."
Read more at philly.com!
Women Entrepreneurs Radio Podcast interview with Deborah Bailey
The Integrity award, for an “artist or individual who has brought credibility and dignity to her work” was presented to composer, conductor, arranger, and performer Megan Cavallari. Cavallari has won numerous awards including three ASCAPs and two Telly Awards, and scored more than 50 films, 25 television shows, 16 stage musicals, and countless songs and jingles, including music for the L.A. Kings. She had one of the most prolific speeches of the evening. Inher second grade class the kids were asked what they wanted to do when they grow up. The boys said be rich. The girls said be Mommies. She said “Leonard Bernstein.” She was so upset by this, she went home and her mother told her to listen to herself and she did. Cavallari stressed that there are only two percent of women composing in the industry and that needs to change. She stated “women have a voice… and it is about time people listen.” She went on further to talk about how distinctive women’s voices are and that what women have to say is important. “Creativity is the thing that sets us apart and sets us free.” Cavallari should also be recognized for creating The Talk Foundation Project recording the observations of children with life threatening and chronic diseases. - Read more at http://www.artsbeatla.com/2017/03/latw/#sthash.7b7NgGlg.dpuf
The 24th Annual Los Angeles Women's Theatre Festival will honor composer Megan Cavallari with the Integrity Award on Wednesday, March 23rd at 7 pm at Barnsdall Gallery Theatre.
Catch the premiere of the awards here on February 9th!
"Award-winning TV/film composer Megan Cavallari will be a featured panelist at the upcoming NonProfit and Communications and Media Networks Event: Share the Love for Nonprofit Collaborations on Wednesday, February 15, 2017 from 5-7pm.
"Cavallari founded The Talk Foundation, a non-profit that gives children and teenagers with life threatening illnesses the opportunity to express themselves through sound. Panelists will discuss how collaborations can be leveraged to make connections with the press to increase awareness of non-profit’s missions.
"Cavallari has a knack for creating music that industry legend Richard Kraft called “amazing and earworm candy.” From film and television soundtracks to stage musicals to having composed music for the Los Angeles Kings, the Philadelphia native has managed to land at the top of her profession (despite the fact that less than 2% of all professional composers are females)."
For tickets and additional information please visit:
https://ncmnetwork.org/2017/01/20/feb-program-share-the-love-for-nonprofit-collaborations/
The FAHF (Fashion & Arts Humanity Fete) Awards 2016, a production that shines the spotlight on creative Do-Gooders, will honor LA based TV/film composer Megan Cavallari for her humanitarian achievements on November 12, 2016 at the JBTV Studios in Chicago. Cavallari is the founder of The Talk Foundation which gives children and teenagers with chronic, serious, and life-threatening illnesses the opportunity to express themselves through recordings of their innermost thoughts and observations.
Honorees of the FAHF Humanitarian Awards are individuals who work in fashion, design, arts, music, technology, culinary arts, theater, media, literature, athletic, and other arts fields that use their talents and/or the arts to complete acts of kindness, volunteer, or to be humanitarians.
http://theamemagazine.com/radio/megan-cavallari/
