A new musical, “Real, enough,” arranged by University of Southern Maine senior Michael Freitag, will premiere in Salt Lake City this week. The production, featuring book, lyrics, and music by Marina Altschiller-Gannon and music and arrangements by Freitag, opens Friday, Nov. 13, at Threepenny Theatre Company and continues through Nov. 22.
The show follows Claire, a writer who runs from her past and buries herself in a book to prove her worth, before realizing she is enough on her own.
Freitag, a music performance major with a concentration in composition, spent more than a year turning Altschiller-Gannon’s songs into full arrangements and producing the recorded tracks that the Salt Lake cast will perform to.
“I would describe my role as taking the songs in Marina’s head and putting them to paper,” Freitag said.
Freitag and Altschiller-Gannon met in 2018 within the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, theatre community and have since collaborated on several of her productions. Following his composition of the score for a one-act “Romeo and Juliet” produced by her company, Dive In Productions, she invited him in August 2025 to arrange her new musical. They collaborated remotely throughout the fall while she was based in Utah, and by mid-December, Threepenny Theatre Company had agreed to stage the premiere.
Much of the arranging happened at USM, where Freitag drew on the support of the Osher School of Music’s faculty and ensembles. He had studied choral writing in the ensembles led by Kenneth Griffith, artist faculty in choral conducting, and Kyle Nielsen, director of the Osher School of Music and head of choral activities, for lessons in harmony, voice leading, and texture.
He then expanded Altschiller-Gannon’s melodies into complete arrangements in notation software, bringing the drafts to composition lessons with Daniel Sonenberg, professor of music and director of composition studies, and to the studio class of composition faculty member Hans Spencer. There, he worked through his process and refined his work alongside other student composers. The most critical feedback was received in Recital Class, where Freitag assembled classmates to perform selections from the musical before a live audience.
“There is an ocean of difference between hearing your writing in notation software and hearing it performed by real people,” Freitag said. “There is an immediacy and vitality to live performance that cannot be replicated.”
For Freitag, the premiere is a milestone in an unlikely return to music. He first enrolled at USM from 2005 to 2007 but left before finishing, then spent years working in other fields, including computer science. From 2018 to 2022, he worked in information technology at the Ogunquit Playhouse, where he watched a professional theatre adapt through the pandemic and picked up a working knowledge of live sound that still informs how he mixes his arrangements. Freitag eventually chose to follow his passion and returned to music, re-enrolling at USM in 2024. He expects to graduate in spring 2027.
He credits a community that made the return possible: faculty who remembered his name years later, and classmates who signed on to perform his music sight unseen.
“There’s a culture here that reinforces the want to succeed, because they want you to succeed too,” Freitag said.
Freitag is currently working on a cast recording of “Real, enough” as well as a second production with Altschiller-Gannon. After the Salt Lake run, he said they hope to present the musical at additional venues, including theatres equipped for a live orchestra. For now, he plans to attend opening night as an audience member.
“It still doesn’t feel real,” Freitag said. “I don’t think I’ll fully believe it’s really happening until it has happened.”