#CMTF2020
CMTF 2020
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Venue and Dates
The 2020 Chicago Musical Theatre Festival will take place February 3rd-23rd, 2019, during Chicago's "Theatre Week" city-wide celebration of theatre. For this year's festival, we're taking over The Edge Theater complex! Performances will take place at The Edge, 5451 N Broadway, on both the "Broadway" (114 seat proscenium) and "Off-Broadway" (38 seat black box) stages.
For Chicago Theatre Week tickets, use the promo code #CTW19
How does CMTF work?
We are the very model of the modern musical festival! Once applications close, CMTF's selection committee selects 10 shows to participate. Those show reps then pay a participation fee, which along with the box office revenue split is what lets CMTF pay for the venue, festival-wide marketing, shared resources, and festival personnel. Festival productions get 50% of ticketing revenue from their productions.
CMTF is designed to showcase musical theatre writing talent, and not to showcase how much you can spend on set design and fancy production whizbangs and flibbetygibbets. To that end, each show gets one full day of tech, a limited time to set-up and strike before/after each performance, and a whole lot of shared technical resources and personnel, including a state-of-the-art lighting and sound package, trained ops, and access to CMTF resources. The festival is designed to showcase your work, get it in front of people who can further develop and produce your show, and get you some fantastic publicity.
Each show gets at least 5 performances in their assigned venue over the course of the festival, with the opportunity for additional performances based on ticket sales. Leading up to the festival, producers are required to attend a series of workshops about producing, developing, and potentially publishing your show, in service of making the most out of your participation in the festival.
Be Seen
For 2020's festival, we're proud to announce a partnership with Steel Spring Stage Rights, the nationally renowned musical theatre licensing and publishing house. A publishing agent will attend every festival show, and a representative from Stage Rights will teach a private workshop on getting your show licensed to every festival participant. This is a big deal.
We invite producers, artistic directors, and directors from Chicago and across the country to attend CMTF. Our panel of judges, which also attends every show, is comprised of producers, composers, directors, and literary agents, and they give each production detailed recommendations on how to continue developing their show.