Two new one act musicals will premiere Off-Broadway tonight when previews start for Inner Voices: Solo Musicals. With opening night set for 6 April, the shows will play at 59E59 Theaters until April 24th under the auspices of Premieres in association with Primary Stages. Both musicals are directed by Jonathan Butterell.

The first of the two musicals is Mosaic features a book by Cheri Steinkellner and music by Georgia Stitt; both have collaborated on the lyrics for the piece. Heidi Blickenstaff plays Ruth, a woman who, according to press notes, is ‘blogging at the crossroads of birth, death, love and Diet Coke’. The show, which incorporates multi-media, shares with the audience a real-time half-hour in her life as she blogs on her MacBook.

Whida Peru: Resurrection Tangle, the second of the two musicals, has a book and lyrics by David Simpatico with music by Josh Schmidt. Performed by Judith Blazer, the show deals with the experiences of a Puerto Rican transsexual agoraphobic psychic on the eastern seaboard as she is forced to evaluate the quality of life, death and what lies in between for her.

This sounds like an interesting initiative and I hope both shows turn out to be as intriguing as they sound. This could prove to be a creatively lucrative concept for musical theatre, which so often flounders under the sheer size that seems to be generally expected of the genre.