LIGHTHOUSE
a new musical
music & story by Veronica Mansour
book & lyrics & story by abs wilson
WINNER of the 2024 Richard Rodgers Award
Selected musical for the Orchard Project's Summer Series (2025), selected musical for the Lucille Lortel Theatre's 121 Project (2025), WAM Collaboration Award Honored Finalist (2025), selected musical for the National Alliance of Musical Theater's Alliances's Festival of New Musicals (2024), winner of the Eugene O'Neill National Music Theater Conference (2024), selected musical for the Rhinebeck Writer's Retreat (2024), winner of Syracuse University’s New Works, New Voices developmental reading program (2024), a finalist for the Eugene O'Neill NMTC (2023), finalist for the Olney Theatre Center Vanguard Arts Fund (2023), NAMT finalist (2023), song "Runaway Girl" one of the three winners of Taylor Louderman's Write Out Loud Songwriting Contest (2023), featured in the Vanguard Theater Illuminating New Voices New Work Festival (2023), featured in New York Theatre Barn's New Works Festival (2023), with further development alongside Millikin University, St. Olaf College, and the Kayenta Arts Center. Originally developed at NYU Tisch.
LIGHTHOUSE
LIGHTHOUSE is a 6-women, fourth-wall-breaking pop country musical following our unreliable narrator "Bus," an 18 year old girl who wants nothing more than to escape her small Minnesota town.
But what Bus really wants to escape? Herself— and everything she fears she could become.
With a cast ranging from ages 18-73, LIGHTHOUSE explores anxiety and OCD, the lives of women in rural, conservative communities, and what it means to be yourself for the rest of your life. Ultimately, LIGHTHOUSE celebrates the idea that maybe, just maybe— every version of yourself is worth being.
the LIGHTHOUSE keepers
WHY US, WHY NOW
When we first sat down to create the midwestern, pop-country musical that has now become LIGHTHOUSE, one thing was clear: we needed to create a show about women, for women, and by women. And not just that, but a show that allows these women to be too messy, too perfect, to be warm, cold, desperate, confident, hilarious, painfully raw— and everything endlessly complex in-between. A show that creates a space for us to see ourselves and know that our story, no matter how small we've been told to believe it is? Is always worth telling.
Both of us have connections to the midwest. I grew up in Minnesota, and Veronica went to college in Indiana. And there's something a little different there than other places in the US, the food a little heartier, the people a little quieter— and the February's a little bleaker. And there's something beautiful and unique about country music that perfectly matches the heart of these rural, story-rich communities we're representing. We also wanted to earnestly explore how mental health, isolation, and the often religious communities there so shape the lives of these women. Veronica has OCD, and using a world based around my upbringing, and we wanted to see and honor women of all ages who live with these conditions and others— and let their stories live honestly onstage.
LIGHTHOUSE is, ultimately, a show about self-love— all of us are just made up of all the people around us— and those are a lot of people who need a lot of love. And so maybe, just maybe, we can find a little hope and self-understanding in that fact. Or at least a pretty kickass country musical.
