My hometown
I was born and raised near Philadelphia, but I traveled often to New York to visit the TKTS booth. While at Carnegie Mellon, I served as president of the student drama club and managing editor of the student newspaer. After college, I was cast in an Off-Broadway revival of The Mikado and performed for a few years, while studying with Craig Carnelia and Uta Hagen, before I got a daytime gig at the Dramatists Guild, where I coordinated the Jonathan Larson Fellowship for Stephen Sondheim and launched The Dramatist magazine. While at the Guild, I also founded a theater company, sang in the Juilliard Choral Union, and wrote in the BMI Musical Theater Workshop, but I left New York to help Arena Stage open the Mead Center, where I worked on Next to Normal and four other Broadway transfers, taught at Camp Arena Stage, and performed in the Edward Albee Festival. My next stop was the Educational Theatre Association, where I edited Dramatics and Teaching Theatre, taught at the International Thespian Festival, and launched the Next Generation Works program.
You can read recommendation letters about me and my work HERE from Stephen Sondheim and others.
More About My Writing
“In Their Company”
My literary work includes roles as editor, critic, journalist, librettist, and lyric writer. I’ve contributed to numerous publications, including the books In Their Company and Conversations with Terrence McNally, as well as theater programs across the U.S. and on the West End. My work is also cited in Introduction to the Art of Theatre (Cassady), Marc Blitzstein (Pollack), Tradition! (Isenberg), and Wikipedia, among others. I’ve interviewed some two dozen Pulitzer-winning writers as well as Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka and moderated panels at venues including New Dramatists, La Mama, Goodman Theater, and Pittsburgh Public. You can read my conversations with Jason Robert Brown and Rupert Holmes on their official sites and others at Breaking Character, Broadway.com, Dramatics, and Where. My produced stage work includes the musical short Here We Are and the full-lengths The Split-Aparts and Raven Brings Light.
More About My Teaching
A cast party at Sardi’s with Uta Hagen.
My first foray into teaching was as a “key student” assistant for Uta Hagen in her advanced acting class at HB Studio. Since then, I’ve taught at summer camps, student festivals, teacher conferences, and leadership summits for Arena Stage, Educational Theatre Association, and others. In my work for EdTA, I was regularly quoted in publications, including American Theatre, Backstage, NPR, Stage Directions, and Wall Street Journal. You can watch my webinar “Writing Your Own Musical” on the Educator Pro website.
More About My Producing
My producing work includes founding the theater company Music in a Box, which debuted with the 25th anniversary revival of Philemon, called “as worthy a production of a lost masterpiece as one could hope.” (The photo at left shows Judy Blazer, Tom Jones, Karen Ziemba, Alfred Uhry, Robert Waldman, Liz Callaway, Lynn Ahrens, Douglas J. Cohen, David Shire, and me at the MIB launch party.) I made my directing debut with MIB on the original musical Baby Buddha at the Off-Broadway Zipper Theatre. Most recently, I was producer of Next Generations Works, a suite of programs I created to develop new plays, musicals, and films by teens and by professionals for teens. You can watch the NGW student workshops of Group (2015), Chrysalis (2016), Guilty (2017), How to Get a 5 on the AP Test (2018), and Wrath of the PTA (2019), as well as Making of a Musical, a vlog series about the program.
More About My Performing
With Julie Harris and Charles Nelson Reilly.
I made my Off-Broadway acting debut as Pish-Tush in a revival of The Mikado and have done more than 100 shows, concerts, and recordings since then, including the original musicals The It Girl at Musical Theatre Works, Love Is Spoken Here at Maine State Music Theatre, and Masada at York Theatre, as well as the premiere of the Peter Martins ballet Chichester Psalms. I’ve performed opposite Charles Nelson Reilly, Matthew Broderick, and Helen Gallagher, and I’ve sung at Carnegie Hall and other venues under the baton of Paul Gemignani, Skitch Henderson, and Rob Fisher, as well as with They Might Be Giants in Lincoln Center’s American Songbook Series. If you listen closely, you can hear me belting out the bass lines in “A Seed of Grain” on The Bucket List soundtrack and in “Sunday,” the finale on the Wall to Wall Sondheim concert recording, taped live at Symphony Space.