Peter Mills has been awarded the third annual Fred Ebb Award, which recognizes excellence in musical theater songwriting. The prize, which will be presented by director Scott Ellis on November 26 at the American Airlines Theatre's Penthouse Lounge, includes a $50,000 award.
The Fred Ebb Award is named in honor of the late award-winning lyricist Fred Ebb, who passed away in September 2004, and funded by the Fred Ebb Foundation from royalties from Ebb's vast catalog of work. Awarded to a songwriter or songwriting team that has not yet achieved significant commercial success, the prize is meant to encourage and support aspiring songwriters to create new works for the musical theater. The selection panel includes Foundation trustee Mitchell S. Bernard, Sheldon Harnick, David Loud, Tim Pinckney, Arthur Whitelaw and Karen Ziemba.
Mills received 2005 Drama Desk Award nominations for his show The Pursuit Of Persephone Best Music and Best Orchestrations, the 2003 Richard Rodgers New Horizons Award from the ASCAP Foundation and a 2002 grant from the Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation. Most recently, he wrote music and lyrics for The Rockae, a rock musical based on The Bacchae. Other recent projects include lyrics for Iron Curtain music by Stephen Weiner, book by Susan DiLallo, and music and lyrics for The Alchemists, Illyria a musical adaptation of Twelfth Night, which had its premiere at The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey in Fall 2004, with a cast album released in April 2005 and The Taxi Cabaret published by Samuel French in Fall 2004. With Cara Reichel, he wrote The Flood, which was selected for the ASCAP Musical Theater Workshop 2001. Marco Polo, written with composer Deborah Abramson, was selected for the ASCAP Musical Theater Workshop in 2000. Mills holds an M.F.A. in Musical Theater Writing from New York University's Tisch School for the Arts and a degree in English/Dramatic Literature from Princeton University. He is a founding member of Prospect Theater Company.