About Us

Hi! We’re The Kilbanes - Kate Kilbane and Dan Moses, a married musical theater writing and performing team. We are thrilled to report that we just received a 2023 Jonathan Larson Grant from the American Theatre Wing! Our rock musical Weightless (WP Theater, ACT, Public Theater’s Under the Radar, Z Space SF) was nominated for a Lucille Lortel award (Best Musical) and a Drama Desk award (Best Music) in 2023.  Other works include The Code (ACT), My Antonia (Next Generation Commission, Latte Da Theater in Minneapolis, with Jessie Austrian and Noah Brody of Fiasco Theater - upcoming),  As You Like It (San Francisco Shakespeare Festival), and Eddie the Marvelous (Northwestern AMTP - upcoming, O’Neill National Music Theater Conference, Berkeley Rep Ground Floor).

We also have two children and a poodle named Winston.

About our work

We are both obsessed with and terrified of musicals. Why is there music at all - and why on earth are they singing? We engage with this question as much as we can, experimenting with story structures, tonal worlds, and musical genres:

• Eddie the Marvelous, the story of a man who manages his profound social anxiety by reimagining himself as a Ziggy-Stardust-style intergalactic superhero, puts two plays in parallel - an intimate, realistic living room drama and a glam rock space opera - and then merges them. 

• The Code is a sprawling ensemble drama that tells the stories of two groups of students attending the same school one hundred years apart, with an electro-pop score and a mystery at the center of the plot. We joke that it’s Goonies meets Arcadia meets Spring Awakening; we’re only sort of kidding.

• Weightless begins as an indie rock band reimagining an Ovidian myth in concert - then, when an actual God shows up and takes over the story, the form shifts, and the band members themselves get transformed into characters.

• My Antonia is an adaptation of Willa Cather’s famous novel that puts the author herself onstage with her characters and addresses the fallibility of memory and the question of how we understand our own heritage. In that piece, the band is onstage among the actors playing sweeping indie folk music. 

Every piece we write teaches us how much we want to do, how much there is to learn. 

Photo credit Natalie Powers