Mel Shapiro is an American theatre director and writer, college professor, and author.
Trained at Carnegie-Mellon University, Shapiro began his professional directing career at the Pittsburgh Playhouse and then as resident director at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. He was co-producing director at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and has worked as guest director at the Hartford Stage Company, the Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles (where he directed the American Premiere of Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist), the National Playwright's Conference of the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center and the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada.
Shapiro's off-Broadway productions include the original staging of John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves, which won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best American Play in 1971, and Rachel Owen's The Karl Marx Play for the American Place Theatre. London productions include the musicals Two Gentlemen of Verona and Kings and Clowns.
For Broadway, Shapiro co-wrote the book (with Guare) and directed the 1971 musical adaptation of Two Gentlemen of Verona and directed the 1978 revival of Stop the World - I Want to Get Off with Sammy Davis Jr. as well as John Guare's 1979 play Bosoms and Neglect . He has staged works at Lincoln Center, including Václav Havel's The Increased Difficulty of Concentration, which won an Obie Award for Best Foreign Play and Shakespeare's Richard III. His relationship with Joseph Papp spanned six years at the New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theater. Among his productions there are Guare's Rich and Famous , Marco Polo Sings a Solo , and John Ford Noonan's Older People.
Shapiro was one of the founding members of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and served as the head of the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama. He was the head of graduate acting for the Theatre Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has taught and directed at the Queensland University of Technology's Theatre School in Brisbane, Australia, and the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, Australia, in Fall, 2011. He has served on the boards of the Pittsburgh Public Theater, the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, and the Fund for New American Plays at the Kennedy Center and Theatre of Latin America.
Shapiro is the author of The Director's Companion and An Actor Performs.
John Guare is an American playwright and screenwriter. He is best known as the author of The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation.
A. J. Antoon was an American theatre director. He attended the Yale School of Drama. Beginning in 1971, Antoon directed numerous plays at the New York Shakespeare Festival over a period of nearly 20 years. In 1973, Antoon became one of the few directors to have been nominated for two Tony Awards in the same category in the same year. In addition to winning the Tony Award with one of his nominations, Antoon was also the winner of a Drama Desk Award, a New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, and an Obie Award. His career lasted until 1991; he died less than a year later from AIDS-related lymphoma.
Lynn Nottage is an American playwright whose work often focuses on the experience of working-class people, particularly working-class people who are Black. She has received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice: in 2009 for her play Ruined, and in 2017 for her play Sweat. She was the first woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama two times.
Bill Rauch is an American theatre director. He was named the inaugural artistic director of the Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center (PACNYC) at the World Trade Center in 2018. The Perelman was the final piece of the plan to revitalize the World Trade Center site.
Michael Howell Blakemore AO OBE was an Australian actor, writer and theatre director who also made a handful of films. A former Associate Director of the National Theatre, in 2000 he became the only individual to win Tony Awards for Best Director of a Play and Musical in the same year for Copenhagen and Kiss Me, Kate.
Jack O'Brien is an American director, producer, writer and lyricist. He served as the Artistic Director of the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, California from 1981 through the end of 2007.
Richard John Nelson is an American playwright and librettist. He wrote the book for the 2000 Broadway musical James Joyce's The Dead, for which he won the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical, as well as the book for the 1988 Broadway production of Chess. He is also the writer of the critically acclaimed play cycle The Rhinebeck Panorama.
The House of Blue Leaves is a play by American playwright John Guare which premiered Off-Broadway in 1971, and was revived in 1986, both Off-Broadway and on Broadway, and was again revived on Broadway in 2011. The play won the Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best American Play and the Obie Award for Best American Play in 1971. The play is set in 1965, when Pope Paul VI visited New York City.
Two Gentlemen of Verona is a rock musical, with a book by John Guare and Mel Shapiro, lyrics by Guare and music by Galt MacDermot, based on the Shakespeare comedy of the same name.
Anna Davida Shapiro is an American theater director, was the artistic director of the Steppenwolf Theater Company, and a professor at Northwestern University. Throughout her career, she has directed both the Steppenwolf Theater Company production of August: Osage County (2007) along with its Broadway debut (2008-2009), the Broadway debuts of The Motherfucker with the Hat (2011) and Fish in the Dark (2014), and Broadway revivals of This Is Our Youth and Of Mice and Men, both in 2014. She won the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play for her direction of August: Osage County.
Jeff Calhoun is an American director, choreographer, producer and dancer.
Derek McLane is an American set designer for theatre, opera, and television. He graduated with a BA from Harvard College and an MFA from the Yale School of Drama.
Melvin Bernhardt was an American stage and television director. He was born and raised in Buffalo, New York, and much of his work has been in the New York City area. He is known for his productions of The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, Da, and Crimes of the Heart. Bernhardt began his career as a stage manager; he made his directorial debut in 1965 with Conerico was Here to Stay at the Cherry Lane Theatre.
Signature Theatre Company is an American theatre based in Manhattan, New York. It was founded in 1991 by James Houghton and is now led by Artistic Director Paige Evans. Signature is known for their season-long focus on one artist's work. It has been located in the Pershing Square Signature Center since 2012.
Robert Petkoff is an American stage actor known for his work in Shakespearean productions and more recently on the New York City musical theater stage. Petkoff has performed on Broadway, the West End, regional theatre, and done work in film and television. Petkoff was featured as "Perchik" in the Tony award-nominated 2004 revival cast of Fiddler on the Roof but is perhaps best known for his role as "Tateh" in the 2009 revival of Ragtime on Broadway. Petkoff has also provided the voices for over two dozen audiobooks, winning awards for his reading of Michael Koryta's So Cold the River. Married to actress Susan Wands, Petkoff has lived in New York City for the last twenty years, and often performs in benefit concerts for theater-district-related charities.
Tony Straiges is a scenic designer for the stage and ballet. He has designed the sets for 17 Broadway musicals, plays and specials. His sets "often have a sparse elegance or sense of fantasy about them." Robert Brustein said of Straiges: "Today, he is considered one of the visual poets of the stage." Straiges attended the Yale School of Drama at Yale University.
Bosoms and Neglect is a play by American playwright John Guare, first staged in 1979 at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Illinois.
Amy Herzog is an American playwright. She is known for her poignant and character-driven plays that explore themes of family dynamics, personal relationships, and the complexities of human experience. She has received a Drama Desk Award as well as a nomination for a Tony Award.
Leigh Silverman is an American director for the stage, both off-Broadway and on Broadway. She was nominated for the 2014 and 2024 Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical for the musicals Violet and Suffs, and the 2008 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Director of a Play for the play From Up Here.
Bernard Gersten was an American theatrical producer. Beginning in the 1960s through the early 2000s, Gersten played a major role in shaping American drama and musical theatre.
