Preston Max Allen

“In 2009, my high school made the perplexing choice to do a musical with only 2 female leads when there were dozens of incredibly talented performers in the theater program,” said Allen, who came to Chicago from his native Texas to study at Columbia College Chicago, in a Facebook post. “In college, I decided to write an ensemble show that had 4x that amount of not-cis-guy leads, so it might be an option for schools with demographics like mine, with characters students might in some ways relate to (plus, I just wanted to write some campy screlty horror). Literally 15 years since I started devising, Tigers is now available for high schools, colleges, and wherever else to perform – truly my only goal since the beginning. . . . My mind can’t really wrap around how many people are gonna make these characters their own now, which is the coolest thing in the world! Go Tigers!”

As previously reported in this blog, Allen was profiled in a 2019 interview with Playbill at the time of We Are the Tigers’ Off-Broadway run. In the article, titled “How Preston Max Allen Came Into His Identity as a Musical Theatre Writer and a Proud Trans Man,” Allen recounted his personal journey, including how his experience at Columbia College helped him realize that his primary interest was writing for the musical theatre. “All the other women in my program are substantially more talented than I am,” he remembers thinking when he was a student at Columbia. “I still love writing. I love to write for these women, I’d love to create work for these women.” You can read the interview here.