Gone Missing

Music & Lyrics by Michael Friedman

Book by Steven Cosson

Gone Missing is a wry and whimsical documentary musical about things that go missing -- keys, personal identification, a Gucci pump...or one's mind. The show is a collection of very personal accounts of things lost and found, creating a unique tapestry of the ways in which we deal with and relate to loss in our lives. Devised from interviews with real-life New Yorkers by The Civilians, a New York-based company producing new work from creative investigations. This 80-minute, one-act musical is performed with no intermission.

January 2019

Dreamland Arts

677 Hamline Avenue North, St. Paul

The Reviews

"Gone Missing is a show that is sentimental, that literally talks about nostalgia, but it is also an extremely funny show. On the night that I saw the show, the show had to pause for a moment to wait for the laughter that filled the theater to cease before the show could go on. This balance of humor, sadness and nostalgia, and the joy in the stories in which things were found, blended together beautifully."

~Twin Cities Stages

"Gone Missing is a funny, quirky, poignant little musical about all things lost, as always beautifully performed by the cast and band."

~Cherry and Spoon

Cast & Creative

THE CIVILIANS is a theater company dedicated to creating and producing work that dynamically engages our broader social and political environment. They support artists’ efforts to interrogate our lived experience, question and test the stories that shape our world, and awaken new thinking and perceptions through their creations. Their work is led by founder Steve Cosson, and is rooted in a multi-disciplinary community of artists that includes long-term company members, project-specific collaborators, and participants in its ongoing programming. Drawing on core values of innovation and experimentation, they create and produce in a variety of formats and aesthetics, tailored to the needs of each project: work may be driven by an individual artist, a collaborative team, or be company-devised. Many of their projects take the form of investigative theater, a term they coined to describe their artistic and journalistic process of creative inquiry, research, and interaction with communities and individuals.

STEVE COSSON is a director and writer and the Artistic Director of the Civilians. Recently, Pretty Filthy by Michael Friedman and Bess Wohl, The Great Immensity at The Public and Mr. Burns produced by Playwrights Horizons, top 10 lists in The New York Times, Time Out, The New Yorker, Vogue and others. Other Civilians projects: Paris Commune, In the Footprint (Top 10 The New York Times), This Beautiful City, (I am) Nobody’s Lunch, and Gone Missing. This season, the company is the first ever theater company in residence at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Other recent credits: Dael Orlandersmith’s Stoop Stories; Ethel’s Documerica (BAM Next Wave); Spring Awakening (Olney Theatre); Anne Washburn’s A Devil at Noon (Humana Festival); Bus Stop (Kansas City Rep). His plays are published by Dramatists Play Service, Oberon Books, and Playscripts, Inc.

MICHAEL FRIEDMAN (September 24, 1975-September 9, 2017) was the composer and lyricist for Gone Missing. He was a founding associate artist of The Civilians. Possibly best known for his 2010 Broadway production Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, he was also composer/lyricist for several Civilians productions (Canard, Canard, Goose?; [I Am] Nobody's Lunch; The Beautiful City; The Great Immensity; and In the Footprint; and co-author of Paris Commune. Most recently he was artistic director of Encores! Off-Center, an annual summer program at New York City Center. Among Mr. Friedman's other credits, he wrote the music for Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play and The Fortress of Solitude. He also collaborated with Mr. Cosson on the Children's Theatre Company's 2017 production of The Abominables, which opened the day after his death from complications of HIV/AIDS.