The songwriting team of Sam Norman and Eliza Randall will receive the 22nd annual Fred Ebb Award, a $75,000 prize for musical theater writers who have yet to break through commercially. Bebe Neuwirth presents it on Monday, December 7, at 54 Below.
The Fred Ebb Foundation, whose trustee is Mitchell S. Bernard, gives the award each year in association with Roundabout Theatre Company. The ceremony runs from 6 to 8pm and is by invitation only. The foundation is funded by the royalties from Ebb’s catalog, so each new team is rewarded, in effect, by Cabaret and Chicago.
Norman writes books and lyrics for musicals and opera; Randall is the composer. Their shared credits include two new works. The Debutantes has been through Manhattan Musical Theatre Lab and Newport NewWorks, and Echolocation came through the Experiment Program at Theatre Royal Plymouth in England, earning the team the 2025–26 MTI Stiles + Drewe Mentorship Prize along the way.
Norman’s other musical, Come Dine with Me: The Musical, has played Norwich Playhouse, the Edinburgh Fringe and the Turbine Theatre in London. He received the 2026 Roger Allers Special Recognition Award for Librettists, has been a resident artist at American Lyric Theater, and has been a finalist four times for the Stiles & Drewe Best New Song Prize. He studied at Oxford University and New York University, and his book of comic verse, A Teen’s Guide to Modern Manners, was published by Little, Brown.
Randall grew up in Boulder City, Nevada. Her own catalog includes Black Holes Like Donuts, heard at Symphony Space, and The Yellow Wallpaper at Alleyway Theatre, a finalist for the Mazumdar Prize. Her songs have been sung at Lincoln Center and Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, and in London at The Other Palace and Hackney Empire. She also works from the piano bench: associate music director on A New Brain at Barrington Stage, and Keys 3 on the national tour of Wicked. Both writers are Johnny Mercer Foundation Songwriters and Broadway Future Songbook writers.
This year’s selection panel was Bernard, producer and director Jen Bender, actor Francis Jue, music director David Loud and actor Betsy Wolfe. Each year the foundation also makes a donation to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.
The award was first given in 2005, to John Bucchino. Later recipients include Shaina Taub (2017) and Michael R. Jackson, who shared the 2020 award with the team of Ben Bonnema and Christopher Staskel. Last year it went to Sophie Boyce and Veronica Mansour.
Ebb wrote the lyrics to John Kander’s music for four decades, from Flora, the Red Menace and Cabaret to Kiss of the Spider Woman and The Scottsboro Boys. Their Chicago is the longest-running revival in Broadway history and marks its 30th anniversary there this month.
