Matt Schatz

Matt Schatz

Matt Schatz is a writer and composer. His plays and musicals include A Wicked Soul In Cherry Hill (Geffen Playhouse, Edgerton New Play Award), An Untitled New Play By Justin Timberlake (City Theatre/Pittsburgh CLO), The Door You Never Saw Before (Geffen Stayhouse), The Burdens (The O'Neill, City Theatre, Urbanite Theatre, and others), No One Sings Like You Anymore (Seattle Rep Commission), I Battled Lenny...
Matt Schatz is a writer and composer. His plays and musicals include A Wicked Soul In Cherry Hill (Geffen Playhouse, Edgerton New Play Award), An Untitled New Play By Justin Timberlake (City Theatre/Pittsburgh CLO), The Door You Never Saw Before (Geffen Stayhouse), The Burdens (The O'Neill, City Theatre, Urbanite Theatre, and others), No One Sings Like You Anymore (Seattle Rep Commission), I Battled Lenny Ross (Ensemble Studio Theatre), Georama (St. Louis Rep, Great River Shakespeare Festival, NYMF), Where Ever It May Be (CLO Spark Festival), Dunkfest '88 (Ars Nova), Oh, Gastronomy! (Actors Theatre of Louisville), Love Trapezoid (Astoria Performing Arts Center) and The Tallest Building in the World (Luna Stage). Awards include The Kleban Prize in Musical Theatre, The ASCAP Foundation Harold Arlen Musical Theater Award, The Reva Shiner Comedy Award, the New York Musical Festival Outstanding Lyrics Award, and Broadway World Pittsburgh's Original Script of the Decade Award. Matt has received five Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation New Play Commissions; the most recent is an in-progress science musical with playwright Anna Ziegler. Matt has had television and film projects developed for Fox, USA, TBS, Warner Bros, CBS, EOne, and others and has been in writers' rooms for shows for AMC, Sony, Netflix, and others. Matt wrote the songs for Season 3 of Kevin Christopher Snipes' hit Spotify/Gimlet podcast series The Two Princes. He was a writer for Netflix Animation's upcoming Charlie and the Chocolate Factory adaptation, for which he also co-wrote the pilot with Oscar-winner Taika Waititi. Matt has worked as a story consultant on projects for Waititi, Lynn Nottage, Netflix Features, and Lucasfilm. He's currently co-writing a pilot for AMC. Matt lives in Los Angeles with his wife Jenna Hymes and their two daughters.

Plays

  • Every Now And Then You Find Someone
    Jenny, for possibly the very first time in her life, finds love.
  • Comedy Plus Time
    Three writers from three different backgrounds and generations do their best to navigate their careers and their relationships with one another in an ever-changing cultural landscape. But none of them can have a future career without contending with their past. And just because things don't end well doesn't mean this isn't a comedy.
  • The Past, A Present Yet To Come
    London. Early December 1842. An ambitious young family man plans an elaborate trick on his old miser of an uncle, Ebenezer Scrooge. To help, he enlists a sarcastic and morally suspect female theatrical producer, and a mumbly writer, who hasn't had a hit since Nicholas Nickleby.
  • An Untitled New Play By Justin Timberlake
    Beth is an ambitious literary manager at a non-profit theater company in New York City. When a well-known white male playwright misbehaves, a slot opens up in the theater’s current season. Beth risks everything to fight for a play set in Kenya by an emerging female playwright. But Beth’s artistic director has another writer in mind and this writer might just be a genius! AN UNTITLED NEW PLAY BY JUSTIN...
    Beth is an ambitious literary manager at a non-profit theater company in New York City. When a well-known white male playwright misbehaves, a slot opens up in the theater’s current season. Beth risks everything to fight for a play set in Kenya by an emerging female playwright. But Beth’s artistic director has another writer in mind and this writer might just be a genius! AN UNTITLED NEW PLAY BY JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE is a satire about celebrity worship, identity politics, love, sex, death, truth, money, privilege, and everything else we contend with when trying to decide what stories are worth telling.
  • The Burdens
    Mordy is a struggling musician living in Los Angeles. His older sister Jane is a successful attorney and a mother of three in New Jersey. But when their widowed mother's life becomes emotionally and financially taxed by her terrible, centenarian father, these two adult siblings are drawn together into an elaborate plot to relieve their mother’s burden and their own. Told almost entirely via text messages,...
    Mordy is a struggling musician living in Los Angeles. His older sister Jane is a successful attorney and a mother of three in New Jersey. But when their widowed mother's life becomes emotionally and financially taxed by her terrible, centenarian father, these two adult siblings are drawn together into an elaborate plot to relieve their mother’s burden and their own. Told almost entirely via text messages, The Burdens is a dark, family comedy about how technology helps keep us close, while still enabling us to keep our distance. It’s sometimes easier to type something than it is to say it face to face. But please, be careful of auto-correct. It can be murder.
  • The Door You Never Saw Before
    Part musical, part adventure, this inventive new play is designed to take frustrated kids in quarantine on an outrageously fun journey. After entering a door they’ve never seen before, the kids are tasked with saving a faraway city from a villain known only as “The Stench.” Kids will receive a suitcase full of surprises to aid in their quest, and will get to choose where their Zoom story takes them. Filled with...
    Part musical, part adventure, this inventive new play is designed to take frustrated kids in quarantine on an outrageously fun journey. After entering a door they’ve never seen before, the kids are tasked with saving a faraway city from a villain known only as “The Stench.” Kids will receive a suitcase full of surprises to aid in their quest, and will get to choose where their Zoom story takes them. Filled with musical whimsy and quirky characters, this show is sure to delight kids and parents alike.
  • Comfort King
    A son comes home to visit his father who works as a salesman at a mattress store.
  • Where Ever It May Be
    Hugh Everett: Born 1930, Washington, DC. Nancy Gore: Born 1930, Amherst, Massachusetts. Met at Princeton: 1956. Married: 1957. Sounds like the blueprint for a typical mid-century romance. But Everett, the physicist behind the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, was no ordinary man. And this is no ordinary love story. It’s a quantum physics love story, in which we don’t see just one version of...
    Hugh Everett: Born 1930, Washington, DC. Nancy Gore: Born 1930, Amherst, Massachusetts. Met at Princeton: 1956. Married: 1957. Sounds like the blueprint for a typical mid-century romance. But Everett, the physicist behind the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, was no ordinary man. And this is no ordinary love story. It’s a quantum physics love story, in which we don’t see just one version of Hugh and Nancy’s relationship, but many. Each decision takes the couple down a different path, as the Hughs and Nancys of parallel worlds embrace, collide or miss one another entirely. A one-of-a-kind musical about limitless possibility.
  • GEORAMA: An American Panorama Told on Three Miles of Canvas
    Book by West Hyler and Matt Schatz. Music and lyrics by Matt Schatz. Additional music and lyrics by Jack Herrick. In the 1850s, John Banvard did more to elevate fine arts than any single American artist before him.
    Banvard was the most famous living painter in the world and the first millionaire artist, world-renowned for his three-mile long moving panorama celebrating the majesty of the Mighty...
    Book by West Hyler and Matt Schatz. Music and lyrics by Matt Schatz. Additional music and lyrics by Jack Herrick. In the 1850s, John Banvard did more to elevate fine arts than any single American artist before him.
    Banvard was the most famous living painter in the world and the first millionaire artist, world-renowned for his three-mile long moving panorama celebrating the majesty of the Mighty Mississippi. It was called the Georama.
    Today an examination of most reference books will not turn up a single mention of his name. John Banvard, the greatest artist of his time, has been utterly obliterated by history. This musical tells his story.
  • Dunkfest '88
    Summer of ’88: a handful of larger-than-life ballers show up at a local gym to compete for a $10,000 grand prize in an annual slam-dunk contest. But unexpected drama takes center court in this hip-hop musical comedy about dope beats, fly dunks and second chances.
  • Love Trapezoid
    Things were looking up for Betty Lou Mandell. She just wrote a musical. She just met a boy. But when her beloved composer/collaborator dies suddenly, she finds herself unable to move on. Or write. In an effort to help her with both problems, her new boyfriend invents a music-composing robot. Instead, Betty Lou uses this robot to bring her late collaborator back from the dead. Sort of. When this new “...
    Things were looking up for Betty Lou Mandell. She just wrote a musical. She just met a boy. But when her beloved composer/collaborator dies suddenly, she finds herself unable to move on. Or write. In an effort to help her with both problems, her new boyfriend invents a music-composing robot. Instead, Betty Lou uses this robot to bring her late collaborator back from the dead. Sort of. When this new “collaboration” begins to affect her other relationships, Betty Lou must choose between being a writer and being a girlfriend in this musical comedy that examines art, technology, and everything we use to grieve the loss of someone that we love.
  • The Tallest Building in the World
    With equal measure of ego and genius, a young New York engineer sets out to build the world's tallest building - an easy task, as long as he can get his architect, the owner of the Empire State Building, and the Laws of Physics to cooperate. Based on actual events, The Tallest Building in the World examines the 1960s birth of the World Trade Center towers and what is gained and what is lost when we try to reach the sky.