Mindi Dickstein

MINDI DICKSTEIN is an award-winning lyricist, librettist, and playwright. She is perhaps best known as the lyricist for the Broadway musical LITTLE WOMEN (MTI, Ghostlight Records), which has been performed worldwide, most recently in Japan, the UK, and across the USA and Canada. She is currently writing lyrics for BENNY & JOON, based on the MGM film (World Premiere, Old Globe San Diego; East Coast premiere, The Paper Mill Playhouse). New works in development include MAIDEN VOYAGE, commissioned by New Works Provincetown, and THE LITTLE PRINCE, a multimedia musical which will premiere internationally in 2022.  Recent projects include book and lyrics for TRIP, commissioned by Playwrights Horizons, book for TOY STORY-THE MUSICAL for Disney, and two short plays written for Climate Change Theater Action, a biannual event in support of heightening awareness of the worldwide climate change crisis. Her short story THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO HAPPINESS was written for the collection HELLO WINTER, now available on Amazon.com. Her short play HELENA ZENGEL GETS HER PERIOD was written for Rootbeer Occasion Theatre Company.  Plays include THE EXISTENTIAL GOURMET (Jane Chambers Awards) and GUADELOUPE (Westbeth). Mindi’s work has been developed at NAMT, Theatreworks Silicon Valley, Second Stage, The Women’s Project, Playwrights Horizons, Rhinebeck Writer’s Retreat, and The Goodspeed Johnny Mercer Colony. Her songs have been performed widely, including at The Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center’s American Songbook, The Dramatists Guild’s Great Writers Thank Their Lucky Stars, The Lilly Awards, and 54 Below. She has received a Larson Foundation Award, Massachusetts Artists and New York Foundation for the Arts Playwriting Fellowships, a Second Stage Klinsky Award, and a PEN International New Playwright Award (selected by Wendy Wasserstein). She was an Oscar Hammerstein Fellow at the NYU Graduate Musical Theater Writing program, where she received her MFA and now serves on the faculty.

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
Facebook: Mindi Lilah Dickstein
Twitter: @mindidickstein
IG:@mindidickstein

MORE ABOUT ME
Why do I keep doing theater?*
A very good question.  I always quote Samuel Beckett when I say my relationship to theater is: "I can't go on, I'll go on."  I write a lot. I love-hate being in rehearsal. Opening nights pain me.  But writing is solving mathematical problems and discovering moments and endlessly fascinating.  And when I'm not writing I adore teaching.  I love talking with students about why a lyric or a moment is wonderful or how it might be better.  It's all connected, this passion for the moments that become indelible, this need to write things down that I observe or imagine. 

How do you imagine telling stories now?* 
It feels the same as ever: focusing on the specific characters, moments, journeys, and tales that haunt me.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
I'm writing two new musicals (see my bio), revising one that has had two full productions (small nips and tucks now), and writing short plays and short stories in between (like cups of sherbet between courses or, perhaps, a martini).  I think a lot about Camus' The Plague and the man in it who spends his time shifting peas from one pan to another and back again as a way to endure.  Hopefully I'm doing more than shifting peas.