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Ray of Light Theatre is a musical theatre company in San Francisco, California. It performs in the Victoria Theatre in the Mission District.
Ray of Light Theatre was founded by artistic director Shane Ray and board co-chair Adrienne Abrams in 2000.
Production highlights & honors:
In 2005, 2 Broke Girls star Beth Behrs appeared as Sandy Dumbrowski in the musical Grease.
In 2005, ROLT produced Bat Boy: The Musical , directed by James Monroe Iglehart.
In 2009, the month-long run of The Who's Tommy garnered six Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Awards (of eleven nods). [1]
In 2011, the ROLT production of Assassins was nominated for 13 BATCC awards, winning 8, including Best Musical. [2]
In 2012, the ROLT production of Sweeney Todd was nominated for 6 BATCC awards, winning best featured actress. [3]
In 2015, ROLT produced the Bay Area Premiere of Heathers the Musical and worked with writers Tim Maner, Steven Cheslik-deMeyer and Alan Stevens Hewitt on producing Lizzie the Musical. In the 2016 season ROLT received good reviews in the San Francisco Chronicle for The Wild Party (Lippa Musical). [4] The same paper's critic praised the 2024 production of Legally Blonde, presenting it as an example for a "fluffy musical" that nonetheless communicates "a key political point." [5]
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, also known as Sweeney Todd is a 1979 musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by Hugh Wheeler. It is based on the 1970 play Sweeney Todd by Christopher Bond. The character of Sweeney Todd first appeared in a Victorian penny dreadful titled The String of Pearls.
Michael Cerveris Jr. is an American actor, singer, and guitarist. He has performed in many stage musicals and plays, including several Stephen Sondheim musicals: Assassins, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Sunday in the Park with George, Road Show, and Passion. In 2004, Cerveris won the Tony Award as Best Featured Actor in a Musical for Assassins as John Wilkes Booth. In 2015, he won his second Tony Award as Best Actor in a Musical for Fun Home as Bruce Bechdel.
Tobias Ragg is a fictional character who appears in various adaptations of the story Sweeney Todd. The character is an apprentice to the abusive barber Pirelli until Pirelli is murdered by Todd. Tobias proceeds to stay with Todd and Mrs. Lovett, helping the latter out in her meat pie shop. Later, Tobias discovers that they have a joint venture to cook the men Todd shaves into meat pies. He ultimately kills Todd after Todd kills Lovett and Lucy Barker, along with multiple others.
The Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical is an honor presented at the Tony Awards, a ceremony established in 1947 as the Antoinette Perry Awards for Excellence in Theatre, to actors for quality leading roles in a musical play, whether a new production or a revival. The awards are named after Antoinette Perry, an American actress who died in 1946.
Alexander Cesare Gemignani is a Broadway actor, tenor, musician, and conductor. He was nominated for a Tony Award for his performance in Carousel and a Drama Desk Award for his performance in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
Zorba is a musical with a book by Joseph Stein, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and music by John Kander. Adapted from the 1946 novel Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis and the subsequent 1964 film of the same name, it focuses on the friendship that evolves between Zorba and Nikos, a young American who has inherited an abandoned mine on Crete, and their romantic relationships with a local widow and a French woman, respectively.
A concert performance or concert version is a performance of a musical theater or opera in concert form, without set design or costumes, and mostly without theatrical interaction between singers.
Norm Lewis is an American actor and baritone singer. He has appeared on Broadway and in London'sWest End, film, television, recordings and regional theatre. He’s also noted for his wide vocal range. Lewis was the second African-American actor after Robert Guillaume to perform in the title role in Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera and the first one to do so in the Broadway production. In 2023, he reprised the role in the show's sequel, Love Never Dies, in the West End.
The Golden Gate Theatre is a performance venue located at 1 Taylor Street at the corner of Golden Gate Avenue in San Francisco, California, United States. It opened in 1922 as a vaudeville house and later was a major movie theater. In the 1960s it boasted a Cinerama screen, but by the early 1970s it had declined and was showing blaxploitation films. It was restored and reopened as a performing arts venue in 1979.
New Line Theatre is an alternative musical theatre company in St. Louis, Missouri, producing challenging, adult, politically and socially relevant works of musical theatre. The company was created in 1991 and produces world premieres such as Love Kills, Johnny Appleweed, Woman with Pocketbook, She's Hideous, In the Blood, Attempting the Absurd, and The AmberKlavier; lesser known Broadway and off Broadway shows such as High Fidelity, Passing Strange, bare, The Wild Party, Floyd Collins, A New Brain, March of the Falsettos, Passion, The Robber Bridegroom, The Nervous Set, and Bat Boy; abstract musicals such as Hair, Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, and Songs for a New World; absurdist musicals such as Reefer Madness, Attempting the Absurd, The Cradle Will Rock, and Anyone Can Whistle; concept musicals such as Company, Assassins, Urinetown, Chicago, Sunday in the Park with George, and Cabaret; and reinterpretations of more mainstream works, such as Evita, Man of La Mancha, Camelot, Pippin, Sweeney Todd, Grease, and Into the Woods.
Mrs. Lovett is a fictional character appearing in many adaptations of the story Sweeney Todd. Her first name is most commonly referred to as Nellie, although she has also been referred to as Amelia, Margery, Maggie, Sarah, Shirley, Wilhelmina, Mary and Claudetta. A baker from London, Mrs. Lovett is an accomplice and business partner of Sweeney Todd, a barber and serial killer from Fleet Street. She makes meat pies from Todd’s victims.
The Laurence Olivier Awards, or simply TheOlivier Awards, are presented annually by the Society of London Theatre to recognise excellence in professional theatre in London. The awards were originally known as the Society of West End Theatre Awards, but they were renamed in honour of the British actor of the same name in 1984.
Paul Gemignani is an American musical director with a career on Broadway and West End theatre spanning over forty years.
Timothy Nolen was an American actor and baritone who had an active career in operas, musicals, concerts, plays, and on television for over four decades. He was the second actor to play the title role in Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway replacing Michael Crawford in October 1988.
Lauren Molina is an American actress, singer, songwriter, and musician. She is a co-creator and performer with the comedy-pop, undie-rock band The Skivvies. Her Broadway credits include Johanna in the actor-musician revival of Sweeney Todd. To describe her as an actress, one reviewer said "She's part Mary Martin, Lucille Ball, Kristen Wiig and [fill in the blank with your favorite opera star because Molina has one of the most powerful and flexible voices in the annals of Broadway]." While performing on the first national tour of Sweeney Todd, she received the Independent Reviewers of New England (IRNE) Award for Best Supporting Actress. She won a Helen Hayes award for her portrayal of Cunegunde in Candide (2010-2011), directed by Mary Zimmerman at the Shakespeare Theatre in DC, and received an IRNE nomination for the same role at the Huntington Theatre. She originated the role of Bella Rose in Desperate Measures (2017-2018) Off-Broadway and received nominations for the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Actress in a Musical and Outer Critics Circle for Best Supporting Actress. In 2019, she and her Skivvies partner Nick Cearley co-conceived a new actor-musician revival of "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown", also playing Lucy and Linus, at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. A Detroit native, Lauren received her BFA from the University of Michigan in musical theatre. She resides in New York City.
Alex Gaumond is a Canadian actor, singer, songwriter and filmmaker best known for his involvement in West End theatre. He plays series regular gendarme Caron, the chief of police in Sainte Victoire, in the Channel 5 television series The Madame Blanc Mysteries, starring Sally Lindsay.
Manoel Felciano is an American actor, singer, and songwriter.
Larry Blank is an American composer, arranger, orchestrator and conductor. He has worked in film, theatre and television, and has been nominated for a Tony Award three times.
Marc Routh is a theatrical producer, entrepreneur and professor.
Michael Torontow is a Canadian actor, singer and director, best known for his work in musical theatre. He has played such roles as Link Larkin in the first Canadian production of Hairspray in 2004 Giuseppe Naccarelli in Toronto productions of The Light in the Piazza in 2010 and 2016, and the title character in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street in 2022. He is an artistic director for Talk is Free Theatre in Barrie, Ontario. He has been nominated for Dora Awards both as a leading actor and director.