Drama Club is where the musical goes next.
The American musical has never lacked for talent. It has lacked a home — for the writers the industry has been too slow to find, too cautious to back, and too comfortable without.
Drama Club exists to be their home.
Founded by Shannon Morrison and Scott Ihrig, Drama Club is a development and producing organization for new musicals. Through residencies, readings, fellowships, co-productions, and commercial producing, we support writers from first draft to first preview.
Drama Club Camp — our lakeside campus in Maine, and the writer residencies we host there — is how we find them. Our producing and development pipeline is how we stay with the best of them.
The pipeline runs from Torsey Lake to Times Square. Alumni have gone on to the O'Neill, Rhinebeck, NAMT, and Michigan State's New Musical Laboratory, and have seen their work performed regionally, Off-Broadway, and internationally. This summer, more than 100 artists are in residence — writing the musicals that don't exist yet but should.
Drama Club has invested in and co-produced A Strange Loop (Broadway; Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award — Best Musical), DRAG: The Musical (Off-Broadway; Outer Critics Circle), MEXODUS (Off-Broadway; 11 awards including Lucille Lortel, Outer Critics Circle, Drama Desk, and Drama League), and CATS: The Jellicle Ball (Broadway; Tony Award nomination — Best Musical Revival).
drama club productions
Creative & Lead Producing
Stewarding the highest potential new musicals to their greatest potential.
Co-Producing
Marshaling resources for shows that align with our values we believe have the potential for profits.
Producer Light
Assisting emerging writers in charting development pathways.
International Fellowships
Introducing global writing talent to the New York theatre community.
Drafts
Providing space and resources to read new musicals aloud as part of the development process.
Investing
Contributing to the legacy of musicals in the canon through investment.
drama club camp
Our 65-acre lakeside campus in Maine custom-designed to develop new musicals
Musical Theatre Writer Residencies
Free week-long residencies for emerging and traditionally excluded musical theater writers.
Commercial Musical Takeovers
Get away and collaborate in a focused, resourced, and almost-free way.
Collaborations
Empowering non-profits and mission-aligned teams to do their best work.
developing artists developing musicals
shannon morrison
founding artistic director
Shannon Morrison is a writer, Tony-nominated Broadway producer, and musical theatre doula.
He studied psychology and playwriting at Yale. He went to NYU for his MFA in musical theatre writing. Then he went to Broadway — to productions including Thoroughly Modern Millie, Movin' Out, and Legally Blonde — and learned from the inside how the industry works, and who it leaves out.
He served as IMC's Chief Creative Officer, where he got very good at two things: helping people in power say what they actually meant, and understanding what moves an audience.
In 2020, he and Scott Ihrig founded Drama Club. Two years later they opened Drama Club Camp — built not around a curriculum but around a community: writers helping writers, in enough numbers to actually change what gets made.
His husband Scott is the reason the impossible has an address — the partner who takes Shannon's wildest instincts and makes them load-bearing.
He has spent his career learning how to galvanize teams around a creative vision. Drama Club is where that work lives.
scott ihrig
founding executive producer
Scott Ihrig is a Tony-nominated producer and serial entrepreneur who keeps building his way back to theatre.
He founded IMC more than twenty years ago and grew it from a startup into a $40 million global experience agency — one of the fastest-growing private companies in the country.
When he and Shannon Morrison returned to theatre, they found extraordinary writers with nowhere to go — stranded not for lack of talent but for lack of infrastructure. They couldn't find an on-ramp that fit the writers they believed in, so they built one.
Shannon had the vision for Drama Club Camp. Scott built the structure around it — the partnerships, funding models, and producing infrastructure that allow Drama Club to support writers from first draft to opening night.
His producing and investing credits include [title of show] (Off-Broadway), 13 (Broadway), and the Radio City Christmas Spectacular starring the Rockettes.
His husband Shannon is the entropy in the system — the person who breaks the pattern, introduces the impossible idea, and makes Scott build things he never would have arrived at alone.
The nonprofit theatre in Iowa, the law practice in Minneapolis, the queer political organizing — none of it is a detour. It's the education of an entrepreneur who builds for people the system wasn't designed to serve.
