Ulf Anneken
I was born in Frankfurt Germany and raised in the countryside south of Frankfurt. I discovered the magic of music at an early age, taking piano lessons and pursuing my passion all the way to Boston, Massachusetts, where I graduated from the Berklee College of Music with a degree in Contemporary Writing and Production. Afterwards I moved to Los Angeles, where the Henry Mancini Institute connected me to UCLA, and where I worked from 2008 until 2014 as an accompanist for the Herb Alpert School of Music. Since then, I have worked as a freelance composer, pianist and teacher in Los Angeles. I like to play Bach in the morning and Jazz at night and love to start my day with coffee, a chocolate croissant and a good philosophy book.
What intrigues me about musical theater as a platform for my compositions is its capacity to embrace diverse styles. Moreover, the compelling challenge of harmonizing drama and music—two seemingly contrasting elements—into a unified whole, while honoring form and tradition, has fascinated me for years. Completing this musical marks a significant achievement and I look forward to the next steps of this journey and bringing this show to life.
For a more detailed bio and info check out: www.ulfmusic.com
Michael Chu
I was born in New Jersey but moved to California as an infant, growing up in Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley. Diagnosed with severe congenital hearing loss at age 2, I nevertheless brattily insisted on signing up for piano lessons at age 5, beginning a lifelong love affair with music that was reinforced by an early appreciation of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s work in the Disney animated films The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin.
Throughout my life I have been consistently drawn to musical storytelling through works such Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and ballets like Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker and Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, but I did not truly fall in love with Broadway and musical theater until my teenage years, when I discovered Les Miserables, RENT, Chicago, and Little Shop of Horrors. From there I began to embrace the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, Kander and Ebb, and Stephen Sondheim, making the decision to pursue music at the Berklee College of Music and graduating with a Bachelor’s in songwriting in 2007.
As a gay man, I am inspired by the generations of queer artists that came before me, including songwriters like Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim, director-choreographer Michael Bennett, playwright Tony Kushner, and in particular the late, great Howard Ashman, who infused his work at Disney with a slyly joyous queer sensibility, even as he was dying from AIDS at age 40. I am interested not only in telling modern stories through music, song, and dance, but creating stories that cannot be told any other way, stories rooted in artistic expression and emotions that cannot help but be expressed through movement and music.