![]() The show, for which Lopez also provided the animated segments, was his first professional experience. In 1999, Lopez and Marx, who collaborated on both music and lyrics, began work on Avenue Q, a stage musical which, using puppet characters, similar to those on Sesame Street, dealt with adult themes and ideas. Highlights from the unproduced musical were performed by Rick Lyon, Rebecca Jones, and Susan Blackwell at the BMI Workshop. ![]() Their first project together, Kermit, Prince of Denmark, a Muppet parody of Hamlet, won the Kleban Award for lyrics, though The Jim Henson Company rejected the script, saying it did not have enough "kid appeal." The story was considered for the next Muppet film by Chris Curtin in 2004, until Curtin left the Disney Company. In 1998, while participating in the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop, he met another aspiring songwriter, Jeff Marx. During this period, he took temporary jobs at companies like Pfizer and worked as a weekend receptionist for his old music school, Greenwich House. Upon graduating from Yale, Lopez moved back in with his parents and brother in Greenwich Village, where he lived for four years until he was able to earn enough money writing songs for Theatreworks USA to rent an apartment of his own. During his time at Yale, he vaguely hoped to make a living writing musicals and "had no career options" towards that end, he avoided courses that would prepare him for a career in something more secure like law or medicine. ![]() While at Yale, he wrote three plays (of which two were musicals) and was a member of the Yale Spizzwinks a cappella group, and was influenced by professors such as Vincent Scully, John Hollander and Harold Bloom. Lopez went to Hunter College Elementary School and Hunter College High School, and then on to Yale University where he graduated in 1997 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English (the type of academic degree expressly discussed in the second song of Avenue Q). ![]() At around age 12, he briefly moved away from the piano and tried playing the saxophone, as well as taking courses in musical composition at other music schools. At age 11, he wrote his first opening number. At age seven, his parents bought a piano for him, he saw his first Broadway show, and he wrote his first song. The apartment they were subletting at the time happened to have a piano his mother asked if he was interested in taking lessons, and he said yes. Upon their return to New York City when he was six years old, "it was a fluke" that he started piano lessons at Greenwich House Music School. Lopez spent much of his childhood in Greenwich Village, except for one year in Massachusetts while his father was working for Clark University. His father was director of publications for NYU Langone Medical Center. He is partly of Filipino descent through his father (who was born on a ship in the middle of the ocean after departing Manila) his paternal grandfather was Filipino, and his paternal grandmother was of half Filipino and half Scottish-American descent (both originally resided in Manila). Robert Lopez was born in Manhattan, to Katherine (Lowe) and Frank Lopez. He is also the only person to have won all four awards more than once, having won two Oscars, three Tonys, three Grammys, and four Emmys. He additionally holds the distinctions of being the youngest person to win an EGOT, and winning the awards across the shortest period of time: he won all four in the span of ten years and completed the set at the age of 39. He is one of only eighteen people who have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony Award, nicknamed by Philip Michael Thomas in 1984 as the " EGOT". Robert Lopez (born February 23, 1975) is an American songwriter for musicals, best known for co-creating The Book of Mormon and Avenue Q, and for co-writing the songs featured in the Disney computer-animated films Frozen, its sequel Frozen II, and Coco, with his wife Kristen Anderson-Lopez. ![]()
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