Plans are now being finalised for Playmarket to open an Auckland office in 2008.  The office will be staffed by existing Agency Co-ordinator Katrina Chandra and a new position, a Playwright Development Co-ordinator.

Announcing the first Playmarket New Play Award.  It is open to any new unproduced play written by a New Zealander and the deadline for (email preferably) submissions in Friday 7 December.  Go to www.playmarket.org.nz for further information.

Playmarket offers a range of script advisory services for NZ playwrights.  The assessment service ranges from $125 to $190.  Contact Playmarket for further info.  Unfortunately new musical theatre works do not come under this assessment criteria and we have had discussions with Katrina at Playmarket and they just don’t have the facility for it.  We both get inundated with new musical theatre works during the year.  MTNZ then contacted Creative NZ and discussed this issue with them. You would think they would be interested in assisting new NZ composers and writers and new musical theatre works, but they just weren’t interested and sent me around their website with totally irrelevant links – so once again a brick wall.  Obviously we don’t have the funding to assess new musical theatre works as we rely solely on our member subscriptions now, so if anyone has any bright ideas or thinks they can help out, please contact me in the first instance (Kate).  All we can offer musical theatre composers and writers is they join MTNZ as an associate member (Holly Meyer’s Gallipoli springs to mind, and FANG) and we promote them as much as we can through our networks.  Lionel Priest from Theatre Hawkes Bay reported at the recent zone three meeting, that they had presented a local, unknown work and it was a huge success.