Stephen Banfield is a musicologist and Emeritus Professor at the University of Bristol. His books include Sondheim's Broadway Musicals (1993), winner of the Kurt Weill and Lowens awards, Jerome Kern (2006), and several on British art music of the earlier 20th century. Future publications will include social histories of music in an English region (the west country) and in the British Empire, and a study of classical music's propensity to depict soundscapes.
Geoffrey Block, Distinguished Professor of Music History at the University of Puget Sound, is the author of Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (1997; 2nd ed. 2009), Richard Rodgers (2003), and Ives: a Concordat Sonata (1996), the editor of The Richard Rodgers Reader (2002), and co-editor (with J. Peter Burkholder) of Charles Ives and the Classical Tradition (1996). He is also General Editor of Yale Broadway Masters and Series Editor for Oxford's Broadway Legacies.
Andrew Buchman is a composer, who teaches in interdisciplinary curricula at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. As a scholar of American musical theatre, he has contributed to the Oxford Dictionary of American Biography and written a number of papers for regional and national conferences on works by Stephen Sondheim, including an exploration of the musical sources for "Please Hello" from Pacific Overtures, and a comparison of stage and screen versions of Sweeney Todd.
Bud Coleman is a Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance. A former dancer with Les BalletsTrockadero de Monte Carlo, Fort Worth Ballet, Kinesis, and Ballet Austin, he has directed and choreographed over three dozen musicals, including Company in Vladivostok, Russia, under the auspices of the U.S. State Department Cultural Envoy program. He was a Fulbright Lecturer at Waseda University and Kyoritsu Women's University in Tokyo. Bud's essays have been published by Cambridge University Press, St. James Press, Theatre History Studies: Choreography and Dance. With Judith Sebesta he edited Women in American Musical Theatre.
Garrett Eisler is Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at Ithaca College. He earned a PhD in Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate Center, as well as an MA in English from NYU and an MFA in Directing from Boston University. In addition to essays for several academic journals (including Studies in Musical Theatre) he has contributed chapters to the Best Plays Theatre Yearbook series (Limelight Editions) and written on contemporary theatre for the Village Voice, Time Out New York, and American Theatre magazine.
Paul Filmer is Honorary Research Fellow in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has published work in sociological theory, methods of sociological research and sociology of culture, including specific studies in sociology of art, literature, music, dance and popular culture. His work on sociology of the musical includes studies of both musical theatre and film musicals.
Ben Francis has written book and lyrics for two musicals: Letter From An Unknown Woman and The Dancing Chef (due for production in Buenos Aires in late 2013). He has provided sketches for the long-running BBC radio comedy programme The News Huddlines and his book, Christopher Hampton: Dramatic Ironist was published by Amber Lane Press. He is currently completing a PhD on Stephen Sondheim at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Joanne Gordon, Artistic Director of California Repertory Company and Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts at California State University Long Beach, is an award-winning director whose accolades include five Drama-Logue Awards, a Los Angeles Critics Choice Award and being named "Best of the Year" by the Los Angeles Times. As an internationally renowned Sondheim scholar, she has directed a number of this extraordinary artist's works worldwide, including the first Chinese-language production of West Side Story in Beijing. Published work includes Stephen Sondheim: A Casebook; frequent contributions to The Sondheim Review and Art Isn't Easy: The Theater of Stephen Sondheim. Gordon is active as a teacher, scholar and administrator.
Robert Gordon is Professor of Theatre and Performance and Director of the Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Publications include essays on post-war British theatre, South African theatre, Shakespeare, Wilde, Pirandello and Stoppard: Text and Performance (1991). His broad experience as actor and director informs the survey of modern acting theory in The Purpose of Playing (2006). Harold Pinter: the Theatre of Power was published in 2012 and his production Pinter: In Other Rooms toured to Berlin, Prague, Budapest and Thessaloniki in 2011. In 2012 he directed Kander and Ebb's Steel Pier in Brno and he is co-editing The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical.
Roger Hickman is the Director of Musicology at the Cole Conservatory of Music at CSU Long Beach. Among his publications are the textbook Reel Music: Exploring 100 Years of Film Music, the monograph Miklós Rózsa's Ben-Hur: A Film Score Guide, the commentaries for The Norton Scores, and several articles for The New Grove Dictionary of Music. Active as a performer, he is the music director of the Long Beach Ballet Company and the Four Seasons Youth Orchestras, and he has guest conducted a number of symphonies, including those from San Diego, Indianapolis, and Dallas.
Olaf Jubin is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies and Musical Theatre at Regent's University London and a Visiting Lecturer on the MA in Musical Theatre at Goldsmiths, University of London. He obtained his PhD from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany and has written and co-edited several books, among them a study of the German dubbing and sub-titling of Hollywood musicals and a comparative analysis of reviews of the musicals of Sondheim and Lloyd Webber. He has published essays on the reception of Sondheim in Germany and on the London version of Follies, and is co-editing The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical.
Raymond Knapp, Professor of Musicology at UCLA, has authored The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (2005; winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism) and The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (2006) along with many articles on related subjects, and has co-edited The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical (2011). His other books include Symphonic Metamorphoses: Subjectivity and Alienation in Mahler's Re-Cycled Songs (2003), and he is currently working on a book titled Surviving Absolute Music: Haydn, German Idealism, and the Persistent Dualities of Music in the New World.
Robert Lawson-Peebles worked at the Universities of Oxford, Princeton, Aberdeen, and Exeter. He has been, amongst others, a Fellow of the Salzburg Seminar and a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow. He has published three books on the cultural history of the American environment, a history of earlier American Literature, and over 90 articles on subjects ranging from Sir Walter Ralegh to the relationship of ideology and the arts. He has a lifelong interest in American music. He edited Approaches to the American Musical, and is currently working on a two-volume history of the cultural impact of jazz in Britain.
Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at Bath Spa University where she teaches American Drama and Musical Theatre. She has an MA in Text and Performance Studies from Kings College London / RADA and a PhD in Theatre from Columbia University. Dr. Lundskaer-Nielsen was an Associate Producer of the New York Musical Theatre Festival and worked for two years for the UK writers organisation Mercury Musical Developments. She is the author of Directors and the New Musical Drama: British and American Musical Theatre in the 1980s and 90s (2008).
Nathan R. Matthews is a music director/conductor, director, composer, pianist and educator. Matthews has composed a music theatre work, The Count of Monte Cristo. He conceived, orchestrated, and arranged It Goes Like It Goes, The Music of David Shire. Matthews has worked on Broadway: Children and Art, A Tribute to Stephen Sondheim on the Eve of his 75th Birthday; Amadeus; Off-Broadway; at The Santa Fe Opera; and on concert tours for Columbia Artists. He is producing Artistic Director of The Riverside Opera Ensemble, New York City and Associate Professor and Director of Music Theatre at the State University New York at Buffalo.
Marianne McDonald, Ph.D, MRIA, Professor of Classics and Theatre, University of California, has over 250 publications. She is the author of The Living Art of Greek Tragedy; co-editor of Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy; and her latest book is Space, Time, and Silence: The Craft of Athol Fugard. Her translations (all of Greek Tragedy) and her own award-winning plays are performed nationally and around the world. Her latest plays are called A Taste for Blood, a vampire play set in Dublin, and Peace, about a dysfunctional Irish alcoholic family, with a ghost as commentator.
Robert L. McLaughlin is Professor of English at Illinois State University. He has published widely on postmodern literature and culture, particularly on the work of Thomas Pynchon. His articles on Stephen Sondheim have been published in the Journal of American Drama and Theatre and the Sondheim Review. He is currently completing a book on Sondheim and postmodernism. He is the author, with Sally E. Parry, of We'll Always Have the Movies: American Cinema during World War II and the editor of Innovations: An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Fiction.
David Savran is a specialist in US theatre, music theatre, popular culture, and social theory. He is the author of eight books, most recently Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class, winner of the Joe A. Callaway Prize. He has served as a judge for both the Obie and the Lucille Lortel awards and was a juror for the 2011 and 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. He is Distinguished Professor of Theatre and holds the Vera Mowry Roberts Chair in American Theatre at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Robynn Stilwell teaches at Georgetown University. Her research interests center on the meaning of music as cultural work, including the interaction of music and movement in such media as film, video, television, dance, and sport. Publications include work on Beethoven and cinematic violence, musical form in Jane Austen, whiteness and rockabilly, French film musicals, psychoanalytic film theory and its implications for music and for female subjects, and the boundaries between sound and music in the cinematic soundscape. The current project is a study of modality in television, drawn from its precedents in film, theatre, radio, and concert performance.
Scott F. Stoddart is the Dean of the School of Liberal Arts at the Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY. He has published on the fiction of Henry James, E. M. Forster, and F. Scott Fitzgerald; the musical plays of Stephen Sondheim; and the films of the Coen Brothers, Jane Campion, Jack Clayton, John Ford, Oliver Stone and Martin Scorsese and on the image of the president in Hollywood film and television, including The Adams Chronicles (1976). He is author of The 1980s: American Popular Culture through History and editor of Mad Men: Critical Essays on the Television Series (2010). He is currently writing "Queer Eye" for a "Straight Dick": Contextualizing the Queer Villain in Film Noir.
Joseph P. Swain is author of The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey (1990; expanded ed., 2002), which won ASCAP's Deems Taylor Award in 1991. Other books include Musical Languages (1997), Harmonic Rhythm: Analysis and Interpretation (2002), and Sacred Treasure: Understanding Catholic Liturgical Music (2012).
Dominic Symonds is Reader in Drama at the University of Lincoln. His research focuses on post-structuralist approaches to the musical. He is joint editor of Studies in Musical Theatre and founded the international conference Song, Stage and Screen. He is also co-convenor of the music theatre working group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. He has recently co-edited two collections of essays for the IFTR, The Legacy of Opera: Reading Music Theatre as Experience and Performance (2013) and Gestures of Music Theatre: The Performativity of Song and Dance (2013). His monographs We'll Have Manhattan: The Early Work of Rodgers and Hart and Broadway Rhythm: Imaging the City in Song will appear in 2014.
Millie Taylor is Professor of Musical Theatre at the University of Winchester. Before becoming an academic she worked as a freelance musical director for almost twenty years, which included two productions of Sweeney Todd. Recent publications are British Pantomime Performance (2007), Musical Theatre, Realism and Entertainment (2012). She was guest editor of a special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre on "Voice and Excess" (January 2012). Forthcoming publications (both with Dominic Symonds) are an edited collection Gestures of Music Theatre: The Performativity of Song and Dance and a text book, Studying Musical Theatre.
David Thomson is film critic for The New Republic, and he has written for both the Independent and the Guardian in London. His books include The Biographical Dictionary of Film (now in its fifth edition), Have You Seen...? A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films and, most recently, The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies and What They Did to Us. He lives in San Francisco where he saw a concert performance of Sweeney Todd as important to him as seeing Into the Woods on Broadway.
Keith Warner is an internationally renowned theatre and opera director. In the last thirty years he has directed over 150 operas, plays and musicals in fourteen countries worldwide. He is celebrated for his productions of Wagner, including Lohengrin in Bayreuth and Ring Cycles in Tokyo and London (Covent Garden). He championed subsidised companies taking on the Sondheim canon in the early 1980s and directed Pacific Overtures at English National Opera, Being Alive, a gala for Aids Charities at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. He will direct a new production of Sweeney Todd at opera houses in Copenhagen, Houston and San Francisco.
Matt Wolf is London theatre critic of The International Herald Tribune. He spent thirteen years as London drama critic for Variety and more than twenty years as arts and theatre correspondent out of London for The Associated Press. His first, and formative, Sondheim production was the original Broadway version of Sweeney Todd, which he saw during his freshman year at Yale and returned to many times. He has lived in London his entire professional life.
Stacy Wolf is Professor in the Program in Theater and Director of the Princeton Atelier in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. She is the author of Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical and A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical, and co-editor with Raymond Knapp and Mitchell Morris, of The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical.
