Lynn Ahrens (born October 1, 1948) is an American writer and lyricist for the musical theatre, television and film.
Together with Flaherty, she has written many musicals, including Lucky Stiff, My Favorite Year, Ragtime, Seussical, A Man of No Importance, Dessa Rose, The Glorious Ones, Rocky, Little Dancer and, recently on Broadway, Anastasia and Once on This Island.
Ahrens also wrote lyrics for the title song for After the Storm, the documentary film about young Hurricane Katrina survivors putting on Once On This Island.
[4] She subsequently worked as a freelance composer and singer of commercial music, and wrote and produced a number of songs for children's television, particularly Captain Kangaroo.
Weitzman also connected the pair with George C. Wolfe, and they collaborated on a piece called Antler, but according to Ahrens, "no one could figure it out."
My Favorite Year opened at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in Lincoln Center in October 1992 and ran for 36 performances, winning the Tony Award for Andrea Martin as Best Supporting Actress.
[7] Ahrens and Flaherty's next musicals, A Man of No Importance (2002), Dessa Rose (2005), and The Glorious Ones (2007) were produced at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in Lincoln Center.
[13] They have written a dance musical, Little Dancer, with direction and choreography by Susan Stroman, about a ballerina and Edgar Degas, which had a reading in 2010 at Lincoln Center Theater[14] and a developmental lab production in June 2012.
[19] With a book by Frank Galati, music by Flaherty, and lyrics by Ahrens, Knoxville premiered at the Asolo Repertory Theatre in spring 2020, based on the Pulitzer Prize winning book A Death in the Family by James Agee and Pulitzer Prize winning play All the Way Home by Tad Mosel.
Ahrens wrote the teleplay for the 2004 television musical A Christmas Carol, starring Kelsey Grammer, Jane Krakowski, and Jason Alexander.
[25] With Stephen Flaherty, she wrote lyrics for the title song for After the Storm, the documentary film about young Hurricane Katrina survivors putting on Once On This Island.
She wrote text for the concert piece With Voices Raised (composer, Stephen Flaherty), which was commissioned by the Boston Pops Orchestra in 2000.
She wrote text for the concert piece The Dream Lives On: A Portrait of the Kennedy Brothers (composer, Peter Boyer), which was commissioned and performed by the Boston Pops in 2009, and narrated by Robert De Niro, Ed Harris, Morgan Freeman and Cherry Jones.
Charles Isherwood wrote of Ahrens and Flaherty: "a few composers and lyricists continue to risk irrelevance by pursuing their own lonely paths.
They insist on writing musicals that explore the struggles of men and women, as opposed to the synthetic creatures razzle-dazzling Broadway audiences with their preening vulgarity and self-devouring jokes.