WISHING TO GROW UP BRIGHTLY

Wishing to Grow Up Brightly. Theatre Horizon. 2025

A bold new musical inspired by the real-life story of Amanda Morton (Broadway’s Gutenberg! The Musical!, KPOP), co-created with longtime collaborator and Theatre Horizon co-founder Matthew Decker, alongside Josh Totora and Brenson Thomas. After the death of her father, Amanda Newton—a Korean-American adoptee—returns to her childhood home to help her mother pack up. There, she discovers a trove of his preserved memories, created by a tech company called reMemorex, and is pulled into a surreal and intimate journey through loss, identity, and the questions that have quietly shaped her life. As Amanda searches for connection in the fragments he left behind, she begins to confront a deeper longing: how do you create a sense of home when it was taken from you before you even knew what it was?

As part of the sci-fi nature of the show, we enter into a very high-tech memory space. The back wall of the set became its own character - complete with lines! Thom Weaver and I worked to create a visual and auditory language for the way this tech space behaves and responds to the characters onstage. Everything action onstage had a sound associated with it. I added surround speakers into the theater to fully wrap the audience into this sci-fi memory space. As the memory space begins to break down in the 2nd act, I worked closely with the music department to create a cohesive soundscape that took the audience along the journey with Amanda.

Wishing to Grow Up Brightly. Theatre Horizon. 2025
Direction: Matthew Decker
Scenic Design: You-Shin Chen
Lighting Design: Thom Weaver
Costume Design: Jill Keys
Sound Design: Damien Figueras