Hi there! We are Janine McGuire and Arri Lawton Simon, together known as McGuire & Simon.
We’re a New York City-based musical theatre writing team. Our goal is to create musicals that matter and communicate something urgent and true about our world.
Our work has been developed/incubated at the BMI Advanced Musical Theatre Workshop, The Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellowship, Fire Island Pines Arts Project, Goodspeed Musicals, The Johnny Mercer Writers Grove, New York Film Academy, New York SongSpace, New York Theatre Barn, Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, Wichita Children’s Theatre and Dance Center, Wichita State University, and The York Theatre Company.
We also write songs across all media/genres, and are available for commissions. Our song “The Dream” was sung by L Morgan Lee and featured on “The Rainbow Lullaby”, the first lullaby album for LGBTQ+ families in support of the Ali Forney Center.
Giving back to and being in dialogue with our communities has always been an essential part of our mission, and some of the organizations and charitable projects we’ve supported can be found here. We also perform and facilitate arts outreach in the community, and guest-lecture at the middle school, high school, university, and professional levels on songwriting and collaboration.
If you like what we do, be sure to follow us on social media and, if you are able, consider a financial contribution to our musical The Bubble. We accept tax-deductible donations via our fiscal sponsor and longterm supporter New York Theatre Barn. Click here to learn more.
Our musicals include:
THE BUBBLE - an adaptation of the 2006 film of the same name by Eytan Fox & Gal Uchovsky, about two men who fall in love amidst the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
EXPRESS - an immersive musical about transformative moments in the NYC subway, which premiered inside historic subway cars at the New York Transit Museum and can be performed in any nontraditional space
KIBBY THE SPACE DOG - a Theatre For Young Audiences short musical about diversity and community commissioned by Wichita Children's Theatre & Dance Center
How we met:
We met at the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop, the foremost training ground for the craft of musical theatre writing. We wrote our first song, “Good for You”, when we were paired together on the very first assignment in the First Year Workshop. We now continue our association with BMI as members of the Advanced Composer-Lyricist Workshop and Librettists Workshop. Additionally, Arri serves on the BMI Steering Committee and both are frequent guest moderators.
A little backstory:
We each discovered musical theatre at a young age. Janine McGuire was raised in suburban New Jersey in a small town with one traffic light. At age 10, her parents took her to her first Broadway show, The Who’s Tommy. She grew up adoring rock and pop musicals alongside the classics, and at age 12 she began writing her own musicals. Throughout high school she wrote songs, shows, and frequent fan letters to Tim Rice. Janine attended Barnard College of Columbia University where she earned a B.A. in Music and founded NOMADS, a club for the production of new musicals which continues to this day. She spent several years working at Disney Theatrical Group and producing independent theatre in NYC before enrolling in the BMI Workshop and meeting Arri.
Arri Lawton Simon was born to artistic parents in Wichita, the largest city in Kansas (so many traffic lights). His introduction to musical theatre was the film version of West Side Story. He spent his youth devoted to studying piano, clarinet, voice, dance, and acting, and was involved in all aspects of the theatre, from performing onstage, to playing in pits, to building sets and producing elaborate puppet shows in his basement. He received his B.M. in Composition and Voice Performance from the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University and worked for many years as a music director and composer of commissioned works ranging from film scores to sacred cantatas. Eventually, it was time to take a bite out of the Big Apple, and he came to NYC and discovered the BMI Workshop- and his writing partner Janine.