Abandon All Hope: A Musical Comedy
Abandon All Hope: A Musical Comedy takes Dante’s classic Inferno and modernizes it as a musical theatre piece. With music and lyrics by Samuel Perlman and Mitchell Huntley and book by Mitchell Huntley, Abandon All Hope reimagines Hell as a musical, with Satan at the helm as its director. When Dante, lost and bewildered, shows up looking for a way to get home to Florence, chaos ensues.
Abandon All Hope began as a 60-minute staged reading at the American Music Theatre Project Capstone Festival in March 2022. A concert version of Abandon All Hope was performed in March and April 2023 at Chelsea Table + Stage in New York and Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre in Chicago. Click the image on the right to check out our professionally produced cast album wherever you listen to music!
The Waa-Mu Show
Samuel worked on Northwestern’s annual student-written musical for four years, serving as an arranger and orchestrator on all four shows, as well as a lead orchestrator for The Secret of Camp Elliott and a music director for A Peculiar Inheritance.
Concert Music
In addition to theatre music, Samuel is active as a concert composer, especially in the world of chamber music. At Northwestern, he studied composition with Hans Thomalla, Alex Mincek, and Jay Alan Yim, and had the opportunity to premiere several of his works as a student. Selected works are available for purchase through J.W. Pepper’s MyScore catalog. Samuel is also available for commissions of concert works for ensembles of varied size and instrumentation.
Elvenhome, with text taken from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Book of Lost Tales”, is a collection of Elven poems set to music for solo tenor and septet. Joe Blanchard was the soloist for the song cycle’s premiere on December 4, 2022.
Samuel Perlman 