About Emily

Emily Xu Hall is an actor and an award-winning composer, lyricist and playwright. Born in Tokyo, raised in London and now working in New York, Emily writes musicals and plays with music that centre feminist narratives. She is always interested in the impact of race, nationality, and culture in her writing. Her works always feature meaningful stories and roles for people of colour and people of all genders.

Emily holds an MFA from NYU Graduate Acting. As an actor and writer, she is interested in an ethical workplace and a healthier, safer and more inclusive theatrical practice.

Awards Emily was the inaugural recipient of the Lilly Award to“Go Write A Musical” in 2018 for her body of work. In 2019, she won the Jonathan Larson Award from the American Theatre Wing for Book, Music and Lyrics. 2021 winner of the Dramatists Guild Stephen Schwartz Composer Award for Musical Theatre.

Film Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, the live action movie musical, is now available to stream on Netflix! Emily co-wrote the song “Rip Up The Recipe” for Shawn Mendes and Constance Wu with Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award-winning songwriting team Pasek and Paul.

Musical adaptations In her solo-authored work, she is developing a modern musical which jumps off from Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and centres its matriarch, Lyuba Rañevskaya. She is also adapting a Shakespeare play.

Original musicals Her play with music, Mei-Do (pronounced maid-o), is about Etsuko, who gets more than she bargained for at a very unusual café. Emily’s original musical Nascent Phase is a sci-fi relationship drama, where what’s at stake in Alpha and Beta’s relationship is the future of capitalism, robots and taxes.

Collaborations Emily collaborates frequently in different capacities: sometimes as composer/lyricist, sometimes as one or two of the book, music or lyric writers. For Untitled Chongqing Musical, currently in development with librettist Tom Donaghy for the Atlantic Theatre Company, she is writing music and lyrics. They received the 2020-21 NAMT Frank Young Fund grant for new musical development.