Creative Team |
Kent Nicholson (Director) is happy to return to South Coast Repertory after directing How to Write a New Book for the Bible last season. His directing credits include shows for Berkeley Repertory, Seattle Repertory, the Weston Playhouse, Theatre Under the Stars, TheatreWorks and Actors Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival. Musicals he has directed include critically acclaimed productions of Lizzie, Saint Ex, Grey Gardens, Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris and Long Story Short. Other credits include 9 Circles by Bill Cain, Small Tragedy by Craig Lucas, Satellites by Diana Son, Five Flights and Swimming in the Shallows by Adam Bock. A noted developer of both new plays and musicals, Nicholson has worked as a director and producer on world premieres of works by artists as diverse as Liz Duffy Adams, Adam Bock, Sheila Callaghan, Dave Eggers, Richard Greenberg, Chris Miller and Nathan Tysen, and Stephen Schwartz to name a few. He currently serves as the director of musical theatre and literary associate at Playwrights Horizons in New York. |
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Dennis Castellano (Musical Direction) has musically directed the SCR productions of The Fantasticks, Cloudlands, Ordinary Days, Putting It Together, An Italian Straw Hat, A Little Night Music, A Christmas Carol, Happy End, Sunday in the Park with George and A Chorus of Disapproval. His other recent credits include The Producers, Monty Python’s Spamalot (both with Gary Beach), Sugar, Show Boat, Sweeney Todd, The Music Man (with Shirley Jones), Crazy for You, Annie Get Your Gun and Funny Girl (Sacramento Music Circus); Oklahoma!, Hairspray, Cats, Thoroughly Modern Millie and The King and I (Musical Theatre West); Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, My Fair Lady, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, Guys and Dolls (McCoy Rigby Entertainment); and Me and My Girl and A Chorus Line (The Music Theatre of Wichita). Castellano serves as the head of the music theatre program at the University of California, Irvine, and is very proud of his many students performing on musical theatre stages around the country. |
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Kelly Todd (Choreography), a UCLA theatre graduate, has directed, choreographed and performed in musicals in Los Angeles and New York. She is a proud resident artist at the Chance Theater, where some of her favorite projects have been West Side Story, for which she received the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle (LADCC) 2012 Special Award for Fight Choreography, and Triassic Parq in 2013 and Jerry Springer: The Opera in 2011 both of which won the Ovation Award for Best Musical in an Intimate Theatre and garnered her Ovation Award nominations for Best Choreography and the professional world premiere of The Girl, The Grouch, and The Goat by the Tony Award-winning composer of Urinetown, Mark Hollman. She was named Southern California’s Choreographer of the Year in 2011 and 2012 by StageSceneLA. Other credits include Ivy and Bean, The Musical, Absurd Person Singular and Seussical at SCR, The Who’s Tommy at Segerstrom Center for the Arts, and two world premieres, Keep Movin’ On, featuring the music of Sam Cooke, and What’s Going On, featuring the music of Marvin Gaye |
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Neil Patel (Scenic Design) previously designed The Language Archive, On the Jump, Hurrah at Last and Collected Stories at SCR. His designs are well-known on and off Broadway and at regional theaters and opera houses in the United States and abroad. Patel designed the original productions of Water by the Spoonful (Pulitzer Prize), Side Man (Tony Award Best Play), Dinner with Friends (Pulitzer Prize), Collected Stories, American Night, References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot, Adoration of the Old Woman, Quills, The Grey Zone, Reasons to Be Happy, The Mercy Seat, Some Girl(s), By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, A Question of Mercy, The Language Archive, [title of show], Madame Mao, Anna Karenina, Pilobolus’ Shadowland, the HBO series “In Treatment” (Peabody Award), and the feature film Some Velvet Morning (TriBeCa Films). neilpateldesign.com |
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Leah Piehl (Costume Design) returns to SCR where she designed The Motherf**ker with the Hat and the Theatre for Young Audiences productions of Robin Hood and The Borrowers. Her other select credits include The Steward of Christendom (Mark Taper Forum/Center Theatre Group); Twist Your Dickens (Kirk Douglas Theatre/Center Theatre Group); The Most Deserving (Denver Center Theater); Stardust (REDCAT); Intimate Apparel (LADCC winner Best Costume Design); The Heiress (Pasadena Playhouse, Ovation nominated); The Doctor’s Dilemma and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale (A Noise Within); Paradise Lost (Intiman Theatre); Futura, The Pain and the Itch, Tartuffe (The Theatre@Boston Court); bobrauschenbergamerica, Tree (Inside the Ford); Boom, Men of Tortuga (Furious Theatre Company); Saudade (UCLA Live); Full Still Hungry (Ford Amphitheater); LoveWater (The Open Fist Theatre Company); Robots vs. Fake Robots, Boomerang Kid (The Powerhouse Theatre); 911 (REDCAT); and Someone in Florida Loves Me (Paradise Factory, NYC). She recently designed the feature film All Stars. Her work has been featured at MOMA, Art Basel Miami, and 2010 Whitney Biennial. Piehl teaches at USC; she has a BA from UC Berkeley and her MFA in costume design from CalArts. leahpiehl.com |
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Lap Chi Chu (Lighting Design) has designed regionally for SCR, Mark Taper Forum, Geffen Playhouse, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, La Jolla Playhouse, The Old Globe, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Goodman Theatre, The Shakespeare Theatre, Arena Stage, Hartford Stage, San Jose Repertory Theatre, Dallas Theater Center, Portland Center Stage and Evidence Room. His New York design credits include The Public Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, Signature Theatre, Second Stage Theatre, Performance Space 122 and Kitchen Theatre Company. He is the lighting/video designer for ChameckiLerner Dance Company (Costumes by God, Visible Content, Hidden Forms, I Mutantes Seras, Por Favor and Não Me Deixe), which has performed in the United States and Brazil. Awards have included the LA Drama Critic’s Circle Angstrom Award for Career Achievement in Lighting Design, an Ovation award, multiple Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Awards, a “Drammy” for best lighting, as well as a Lucille Lortel nomination for The Good Negro at The Public Theater. Chu is on the lighting design faculty at California Institute of the Arts. |
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Michael K. Hooker (Sound Design) s thrilled to return to SCR having previously designed Becky Shaw, Goldfish and Our Mother’s Brief Affair. On Broadway, he designed Looped, starring Valerie Harper, as well as the Looped national tour, starring Stephanie Powers. Regional credits include Sunday in the Park with George at The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, Sweeney Todd at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, as well as shows at Pasadena Playhouse, Arena Stage, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park and the Kirk Douglas Theatre. He spent six years as senior media designer for Walt Disney Imagineering, where he produced sound for Disney theme parks worldwide, including Hong Kong Disneyland, Tokyo Disney Sea and Walt Disney Studios Park in Paris. Recent Disney projects include music production for the Disney Dream cruise ship. Currently, he serves as head of the sound design program at the University of California, Irvine. |
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Philip D. Thompson (Dialect Coach) teaches voice and speech at the University of California, Irvine, and works as a voice and dialect coach for professional and university productions. He is certified as a master teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework. This is his 23rd production at SCR. He has served as resident coach for 14 seasons at Utah Shakespearean Festival. He has coached at Pasadena Playhouse, Denver Center Theatre Company and Alabama Shakespeare Festival, among others, including numerous productions at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. He is the past president of the Voice and Speech Trainers Association. |
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Jamie A. Tucker (Stage Manager) is excited to be in his 12th season at SCR. ucker completed his MFA in dance, specializing in stage management, at the University of California, Irvine in 1994. Since coming to SCR, he has stage-managed or assisted on 63 productions. Some of his favorites have been the world premieres of Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain, The Violet Hour and The Dazzle; Rolin Jones’ The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow; and Noah Haidle’s Mr. Marmalade. Other favorites include Elemeno Pea, Jitney, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Crimes of the Heart, Fences, Anna in the Tropics, The Trip to Bountiful, A View from the Bridge, Chinglish, Death of a Salesman and Hamlet. He has had the pleasure of working seven seasons on La Posada Mágica and six seasons at the helm of A Christmas Carol. If you can’t find him in the theatre, he is likely to be riding his bike through the canyons of South Orange County. He is a proud member of Actors’ Equity. |
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Jennifer Ellen Butler (Assistant Stage Manager) has been a part of the stage management team at SCR for 11 seasons and more than 40 productions. Her other theatre credits include Laguna Playhouse, Utah Shakespearean Festival, California Shakespeare Theatre, TheatreWorks, Perseverance Theatre, Spoleto Festival USA and Shakespeare Santa Cruz. She has also stage managed operas for Long Beach Opera and Pacific Repertory Opera. Butler has a BA in theatre arts from University of California, Santa Cruz and has been a member of Actors’ Equity since 2007. |