formatting musical theatre scripts and scores

…professional, industry standards

Ready to submit your musical to producers and theatres? You want it to be formatted correctly, so you look like a professional. We can help with that. We have format guidelines, templates, and videos for musical theatre.

Make sure your script doesn’t get rejected because of poor formatting.

There’s a different format for workshops/rehearsals from the one you want to send to producers.

Book/dialogue: There are only eight paragraph styles you need to know for formatting characters, stage directions, dialogue, lyrics, and scene headings.

Lyrics: Learn the nuance of indentation, punctuation, and capitalization

Music: Musical theatre scores are different from pop music, opera, etc. There are lots of technical things to master such as chord symbols, placement of dialogue, character boxes, stage directions, vamps, segues,,cue numbering, credits, etc.

We have guidelines, videos, handouts, advice, and lots of experience.

This video is from Unit 5 of “The Lyric Lab - Fundamentals” — an online course from New Musicals Inc.

Also of interest:

The Lyric Lab

The Lyric Lab is a hands-on class packed with videos, exercises, tests, handouts, and assignments, guiding you through essentials of writing musical theatre lyrics. The course is hosted by Emmy-nominated Scott Guy (Disney, NBC, PBS, Warner Brothers), with feedback from Larry Todd Cousineau (All That He Was, Flies! the Musical, 40 is the New 15).

The Lyric Lab has been helping hundreds of lyricists for a decade. And now it’s been completely updated, drawing from examples from contemporary Broadway musicals like Hamilton, Evan Hansen, Hadestown, as well as classic musicals from Golden Age.

In Lyric Lab I - Fundamentals, you’ll focus on key areas of craft, including musical theatre song structure, telling your story through lyrics, perfect rhyme and near rhyme, matching the accents of lyric to the music, how to decide which songs to write, and how to format your musical to get it ready to submit to theatres and producers.

You can take this course at your own pace. It’s designed for one unit a week, but you can take it faster or slower; from anywhere in the world. It’s all online.

Fill out the info form, and we’ll tell you how to get started on the Lyric Lab today!

Musical Theatre Writers' Resource Center

You might also be interested in NMI’s Musical Theatre Writers’ Resource Center. This is a FREE page provided by New Musicals Inc. We’ve gathered in one place lots of info we think will be useful to writers of musical theatre. Lists of contests, producers, theatres, tips and tricks, musical theatre history, and a fantastic Idea Generator filled with plays, stories, and idea-springboards yours for the taking (no rights restrictions!).