Composer Peter Melnick contributed scores to over 30 films, documentaries and tv programs before coming home to his first love, musical theater. His first produced musical, Adrift in Macao (book and lyrics by Christopher Durang), received a Drama Desk nomination in the Outstanding Music category for its Off-Broadway run at Primary Stages. Since then Macao has gone on to enjoy numerous post-New York productions, beginning with Boston Lyric Stage and the University of Wisconsin.

Melnick’s collaboration with Bill Russell, The Last Smoker in America, a musical comedy about a dysfunctional family struggling to survive in a world where smoking has recently been outlawed, will have a pre-New York run in Columbus, OH, in the fall of 2010, produced by CATCO and Andy Sandberg. Melnick and Russell have also written two musical one-acts, Patter for the Floating Lady, based on the eponymous Steve Martin one-act, and A Bad Spell, adapted from a Virginia Moriconi short story “Simple Arithmetic.”  

With collaborators Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (book) and Mindi Dickstein (lyrics), Melnick is currently writing a new musical based on Pete Hamill’s novel Snow in August. He is also developing Esther Plays the Palace, based on the Purim story, with librettist Cheri Steinkellner.

Melnick’s film scoring credits include the Steve Martin comedy L.A. Story; The Only Thrill,  with Diane Keaton and Sam Shepard; Horton Foote’s Convicts, with Robert Duvall and James Earl Jones; and Bob Saget’s truly obscene Farce of the Penguins, with penguins. His television credits include the recent PBS feature-length documentary, Cinema’s Exiles: From Hitler to Hollywood; Indictment: The McMartin Trial; Grand Avenue; and Lily Dale, also by Horton Foote.

Melnick attended Harvard College, Berklee College of Music, and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He also studied privately with jazz legend Jaki Byard. (Disclosure: he dropped out of Harvard one year shy of a degree in order to study music at Berklee, which he similarly abandoned seven semesters later when offered his first film scoring assignment. He does, however, have a perfectly nice high school diploma, of which he is inordinately proud.) Melnick grew up in New York, the product of an extraordinary entertainment family. His father, who died last October, was film producer Daniel Melnick (All That Jazz, Straw Dogs, Altered States, Footloose, That’s Entertainment, and the seminal television comedy Get Smart), his mother is Linda Rodgers (composer of  “Three to Make Music,” “A Child’s Introduction to Jazz” and numerous popular children’s songs) and his grandfather was legendary composer Richard Rodgers. 

Melnick now makes his home in Montecito, California, with his wife, Laini, an appellate criminal defense attorney and their children Daniel and Reine. Raised in the New York tradition of bagels-and-lox secular Judaism, Melnick has since connected with the Jewish community in a more active way. He became an adult bar-mitzvah in his thirties, and subsequently had the joy of teaching his own son how to chant Torah. He currently chairs the Israel Committee of Santa Barbara, and serves as president of the Community Shul of Montecito and Santa Barbara. Israel advocacy is his third great passion, after family and musical theater.