Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty
Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty were honored as SCL Ambassadors at the annual New York Holiday Party on December 10, 2019.
Ahrens and Flaherty’s creative collaboration began in 1983 and is still going strong. They are considered the foremost theatrical writing team of their generation and are members of the Theater Hall of Fame. They won Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards for Ragtime, and were nominated for two Academy Awards and two Golden Globes for the song “Journey to the Past” from Anastasia, Twentieth Century Fox’s animated feature film. Anastasia is also now a long-running hit on Broadway. Their 2018 Once On This Island won Broadway’s Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical. In 2019, Ahrens and Flaherty were nominated for their fourth Grammy Award, and for the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame. Other theatre credits include Seussical (one of the most produced shows in America); Rocky; My Favorite Year; Chita Rivera-The Dancer’s Life; Dessa Rose; A Man of No Importance; The Glorious Ones and more recently Knoxville and Marie.
Individually, Ahrens’ work in television has received an Emmy Award and four Emmy nominations. She is a mainstay writer and singer for the renowned animated series Schoolhouse Rock and has contributed lyrics to the feature films Camp and After the Storm. She is the recipient of the Betty Comden Lilly Award for lyrics.
As a composer, Flaherty’s concert pieces have premiered at the Hollywood Bowl and Boston’s Symphony Hall. Other theatrical projects include incidental music for Neil Simon’s Proposals on Broadway and the musical score for Loving Repeating: A Musical Of Gertrude Stein. Film scores include Lucky Stiff, Bartok the Magnificent (Twentieth Century Fox) and the documentary After the Storm.
They serve on the governing body of the Dramatists Guild of America and are members of ASCAP, NARAS and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. They are Education Ambassadors for the New York Pops and co-founded the DGF Fellows Program for Emerging Writers.
Their segment in the video below begins at 47:17: