We hope to host a New Musicals Weekend ignited by the participants of the SPARK program, the BIPOC writing fellowship, as well as national musical theater writers. It will probably take close to five years to gather our "family" of funders and plan the event to be sustainably produced, but then we hope to host the conference annually. The weekend will consist of workshops, readings, seminars, short-runs, performances, and lots of networking. The conference will also be the closing weekend for our Writing Fellow's two-week run of the work they developed while in residency. While this conference is mainly uplifting musical theater, we define that broadly and hope many different types of performances and performers are represented. We also hope to invite a strong group of theater organizations and producers who might be interested in producing some of the work presented during the conference in their future theatrical seasons. Our inspiration for this conference is the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. During the Fringe, venues all around Edinburgh are turned into makeshift performance spaces and you can hardly turn the corner without running into a performance of some kind. We hope to utilize downtown Pittsburgh in a collaborative, energetic manner, helping boost the local economy and adding life to the Cultural District.