“Musicals don’t necessarily need to be serious,” says Michael C. Mitnick ’06. “But they need to be taken seriously by the audience and by the creative staff behind them if they are to connect with a modern audience.”

Mitnick, the recipient of the Office of the Arts’ (OFA) Doris Cohen Levi Prize for the “best combination of talent and energy with an outstanding enthusiasm for musical theater” is already hard at work stirring up the world of musical theater.

Prior to college, Mitnick had written a handful of shows that were performed at his high school, but said that he arrived at Harvard with a “pretty similar background to everybody.”

His first plunge into Harvard’s musical theater community came when he co-wrote “Get Some,” the 2003 Freshman Musical. He then went on to co-write “As the Word Turns” for the Hasty Pudding Theatricals.

With his co-writing of the off-Broadway “Snapshots” during his sophomore summer, Mitnick drew new ideas and icons into the language of musical theater. Mitnick later spent two summers working for Tony Award winner Stephen Flaherty, the composer for “Ragtime.”

From the Currier House musical “Peanut Butter and Juliet”—a transposition of Shakespeare’s play into the American South with “two warring families at opposing truck stops”—to “The Life and Many Deaths of Mister Plumb,” Mitnick’s work is saturated with his distinctive style. In “Peanut Butter and Juliet,” the antagonism between the peanut butter sandwich and the jelly sandwich vendors ends in the invention of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

An English concentrator, Mitnick’s senior thesis is a dark musical comedy called “Cardhouse” that he hopes will be “unlike most musicals people see.” The musical, which grapples with the difficult themes of adultery, incest, and autism, will be read at the Loeb Ex on May 15 and 16.

Mitnick says he regrets that musicals are not seen as “a venue to discuss serious issues the way that some plays and movies are.” To this end, he said his thesis represents “more of a conscious effort to break out of a template both of what I was writing and some of the problems about where musical theater is right now.”

Mitnick stresses the importance of the OFA as well as his thesis advisor Brighde Mullins, a lecturer in English and American Literature and Language, in making possible the work he’s done so far. Though he acknowledges that the Harvard arts scene is able to thrive outside of its academic structure, he says that the college too often de-emphasizes the arts in its academic focus.

“I would like it if Arts First weren’t just a three day celebration of the arts and more of a year-round embracing of what I think is an important thing for students to be involved in,” said Mitnick. “Harvard says it’s important for us to learn obscure topics, yet there isn’t a mandatory distribution requirement where students can choose to pursue arts where they might discover an interest.”

—Garrett D. Nelson