BIOGRAPHY

Jon & Al Kaplan

Brothers Jon and Al Kaplan moved to Los Angeles in 1996 to study concert composition at USC. After surviving three brutal years under the film music-hating faculty, they finally made it to the film scoring program and graduated with degrees in concert composition. Whoopee!

Jon and Al are film and TV composers, but they also love musicals -- especially Ashman and Menken's work, Leslie Bricusse's Scrooge, and Trey Parker and Marc Shaiman's South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. It was out of this love that Silence! The Musical was born. What began as a handful of songs Jon and Al produced to amuse themselves eventually became a website with a cult following. Silence! was covered in magazines including Entertainment Weekly and Maxim, and aired on radio shows like XM's Opie and Anthony and Howard Stern's 100.

Two years ago, Jon and Al wrote several new songs and expanded Silence! into an actual musical. The show was staged at the 2005 NYC Fringe festival, where it won the "Overall Excellence Award" for Outstanding Musical. After seeing the show, Marc Shaiman (Hairspray, North) said “Bravo!”

In closing, the Kaplans' father always told them that the mouth is the most disgusting orifice on the human body. He was a dentist before he died, but he ran his practice into the ground because he hated the human mouth so vehemently. Instead, he followed his heart and went back to teaching music to children. This brings up the most important point: If you work hard, persevere, and follow your dreams, you will eventually die and turn into a skeleton like Dr. Kaplan.