Author takes leap of faith, pursues career in musical theater writing
Kim Bixler was accepted in her 50s to NYU and begins her second year there this month
Kim Bixler is no stranger to putting pen to paper.
In 2012, the Manhattan Beach resident published a book titled “Growing Up in a Frank Lloyd Wright House.”
That September, PBS premiered the documentary “Frank Lloyd Wright's Boynton House: The Next Hundred Years” for which Bixler was interviewed. About five years later, in 2017, PBS interviewed her again for a television show about the architect. After that episode aired, Bixler received an odd call from someone with a phone number from Boca Raton, Florida.
It was film producer Harvey Rochman.
“He wanted me to write a screenplay,” Bixler said, “and he wanted me to do it in three days.”
The issue was, Bixler said, she had never written a screenplay in her life.
But this out-of-the-blue experience helped launch a new passion — writing an original musical.
“I could not stop thinking about the idea of writing a screenplay, I love musicals so much,” Bixler said. “That is what really stuck in my head.”
When she told friends over dinner that she was going to write a musical about Wright, she knew she was committed. After workshops, classes and studying on her own for a couple of years, she took a leap of faith and applied and was accepted to New York University in March 2021. She will enter her second year in August and will graduate in May.
Bixler will discuss her journey next week at the El Segundo Library, 111 W. Mariposa Ave. “My Midlife Crisis: Musical TheaterStyle!” will take place from Monday from 6 to 7:15 p.m.
Bixler hit some roadblocks after deciding to launch her musical theater career.
She began to write lyrics and story ideas when she began collaborating with a composer. But that composer, Bixler said, “dumped” her right before entering the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers contest. She entered the contest in November 2017, without the composer. She did not win.
Bixler attended the Iowa Summer Workshop and did a reading of her musical in July 2018.
Almost a year later, she found a new composer from Canada, but eventually she dumped him because he was “over promising and not delivering,” Bixler said. But she wasn't deterred. When the pandemic hit in the spring of 2020, Bixler took playwriting classes at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, in Northern California, and through the Chicago Dramatists Guild via Zoom. She also did Zoom readings of her work with actors.
During the rest of the year, she enrolled in the yearlong program at New Musicals Inc. and in November attended a Zoom open house of NYU Tisch's Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program.
In January 2021, at 51 years old, Bixler submitted an application for the NYU writing program. After making the final round, she attended NYU's Applicant Weekend via Zoom in March of that year. That weekend included interviews and introductions featuring 50 applicants.
“Half of these people are in dorm rooms,” Bixler said. “It was crazy.” Bixler was nervous, she said. She tried to not draw too much attention to the difference between her and the other applicants.
“I wouldn't show any my background, took off all my jewelry,” Bixler said. “I wasn't trying to look younger. I just was trying not to give everything away.”
During the interview, Bixler was asked if she had any concerns. She did.
“I'm much older than everybody else,” she said.
But they told her that wouldn't be an issue. The university would pick people based on their talent.
“I'm looking around the room,” she said, “and I'm like, `That's great because I'm the only old person here so that's really great for me.”
Bixler said she believed she would not be accepted. She was wrong. On March 20, 2021, she received the notice she was accepted to NYU.
And NYU is not cheap. It costs about $35,000 a semester.
But her husband, Tim, is a retired attorney who is currently an adjunct professor at Cornell Law School.
They currently live in New York City, a sabbatical home they are renting from a professor from Princeton University. Likewise, they are currently subletting their Manhattan Beach home.
“Lucky for me he loves musicals,” Bixler said of her husband, “and he is willing to join me on this journey.”
They have two children: 24-yearold Kendall Bixler, who lives in Portland, Oregon, and works in a birthing center, and 22-year-old Robert Bixler, who lives in New York City, works at CitiBank — and has Sunday dinner with his parents.
Bixler's first semester at NYU was filled with writing labs, playwriting and screenwriting classes, as well as various other classes like music theory. She also took voice lessons the first semester.
She was exposed to not only students younger than her, but also those from around the world, including from Mexico, Brazil, South Korea, China, Canada and Iceland. Bixler was paired with these international students for her assignments.
Bixler broadened her studies during her second semester, taking animation, podcast and puppet classes while still focusing on writing.
A final project at the end of her second semester was a 20-minute musical, which she called “incredibly fun.”
“But it was at the end of the semester, and everybody's exhausted and tired of what was a demanding academic year,” Bixler said. “We were the only people who ended up getting actors to perform it staged, without scripts.”
A much more daunting task, Bixler said, will be her final project — two full musicals. The faculty paired her with the second oldest student, Brazilian Carlos Bauzys, who recently turned 40 years old.
They have worked well together, Bixler said, because of their professionalism and being closer in age.
But there has been little rest before school begins.
They will have had three meetings, one each in June, July and August. They are required to have outlines and themes for two complete musicals by the end of August and eventually one will be chosen.
One of the musicals she and Bauzys are working on is based on the life and death of the latter's friend, Fernando Barba, a multi-instrumentalist, composer and founder of the Brazilian body percussion ensemble Barbatuques. He died last year.
“He suffered a brain tumor later in life and it's all about losing that connection to your body,” Bixler said. “What if your body is your instrument and rhythm is your whole identity and you lose both of those things?”
In July, Bixler traveled to Brazil to meet with Bauzys. She also met Barba's family and visited the apartment where they took care of him the last few months he was alive.
“I think more than anything they wanted to meet me,” Bixler said, “and also see how Carlos and I interacted.”
Bixler said she hopes the musical does well at NYU and later in some production in the United States. But she also said she feels it could have a “lot of potential” in Brazil as well.
After graduating, Bixler said, she hopes to focus on a musical based on on the life of the towering figure in architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright.
“it is my passion project I've been working on for so long,” Bixler said. “I have so much interesting material and I think that the problem with me is I just needed to know how to structure and tell the story. That's what I'm learning now, how to tell that story.”
Bixler was a bookkeeper on the side for her mother's handmade jewelry business — which has been around for more than five decades — while raising her children, and volunteering at their schools and the Cornell Club of Los Angeles. But being at NYU, Bixler said, has allowed her an outlet to be “super creative.”
“It's like pulling the shackles off,” Bixler said.
“I've had a couple of my friends that I grew up with say I had no idea you could even do this,” Bixler said. “I'm like, `I had no idea I could do this.'”
Bixler's event Monday will feature stories, videos and original songs collected from her first year at NYU.