The Freshmen Musical

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At Harvard University, The Freshmen Musical or The Freshman Musical is a student group of first-year students at Harvard College who annually write and produce a full-length musical theater production in the Broadway/West End style.

The Freshmen Musical began in 1996 as an outgrowth of Harvard College's Freshman Arts Program (FAP). Students who had participated in this summer pre-college program decided that because so many roles in Harvard theater were relegated to upperclassmen, first-year students ought to stage their own production where they could take-on the more challenging principal acting roles as well as the senior crew roles such as director and musical director. Rather than stage an existing musical, these first-year students decided to write an original production. This tradition has continued so that as of 2005, ten completely original musicals have been written by the first-year students at Harvard.

The organization is run in the style of a self-perpetuating corporation. Each year, the sophomores who were the producers of the previous year's freshmen musical audition and select a new board of producers, who then take sole-responsibility for overseeing the new production. Because the productions are written as a collaborative effort, it is unclear who holds the copyrights of each script. Since often the music is written by individual composers, the copyrights of most of the music are clear.