Chelsea Music Hall
Maestra
Amplify 2023
A concert amplifying the women and nonbinary musicians in musical theater
March 27, 2023
Chelsea Music Hall
407 W. 15th St., NYC
Online Worldwide via Our Partner All Together Now
6:30pm ET Pre-Show VIP Cocktails
8:00pm ET Concert Begins
Hosted by Kate Baldwin
Music by: Cyndi Lauper, Allee Willis, Brenda Russell, Britta Johnson, Cass Morgan, Debra Monk, Gretchen Cryer, Julia Riew, Lucy Simon, Lynne Shankel, Erin McKeown, Marsha Norman, Nancy Ford, Quiara Alegria Hudes, Stephen Bray, Zoe Sarnak
Grantors
Sponsors
Special Thanks
Donors
Donors
Tributes
Tributes
Performers
Kate Baldwin
*
Host
Emily Borromeo
*
Vocalist
Kennedy Caughell
*
Vocalist
Katie Thompson
*
Vocalist
Setting
Songs & Scenes
*Appearing through an Agreement between this theatre and Actors’ Equity Association, the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States.
“Actors’ Equity Association (“Equity”), founded in 1913, is the U.S. labor union that represents more than 51,000 actors and stage managers, Equity fosters the art of live theatre as an essential component of society and advances the careers of its members by negotiating wages, improving working conditions and providing a wide range of benefits, including health and pension plans. Actors’ Equity is a member of the AFL-CIO and is affiliated with FIA, an International organization of performing arts unions. www.actorsequity.org
Production Staff
Venue Staff
School Administration Staff
Musicians
Board Members
Student Advisory Board
Meet the Cast
Kate Baldwin
*
Kate Baldwin starred as Irene Molloy opposite Bette Midler, David Hyde Pierce and Gavin Creel in the hit Broadway revival of Hello, Dolly!, for which she was nominated for the Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critic's Circle awards. She originated the role of Sandra Bloom in Big Fish on Broadway and earned accolades and a Drama Desk Award nomination for her work as Leslie Lyntonn Benedict in Michael John LaChiusa’s Giant at The Public Theatre. She received a Drama Desk Award nomination for her role as Jen in Keen Company's 20th Anniversary revival of Andrew Lippa and Tom Greenwald's John & Jen. She garnered critical acclaim and a Lucille Lortel Award nomination for Tom Kitt and John Logan’s Superhero at Second Stage. But it was her starring role in the 2009 revival of Yip Harburg's and Burton Lane's hit classic musical Finian's Rainbow, which drew Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critic's Circle Award nominations and put her on the map as "a real musical theatre star" (New York Post). Kate has appeared in the Broadway casts of The Full Monty, Thoroughly Modern Millie and Wonderful Town. She starred in The King and I at Lyric Opera of ChicagoIrving Berlin’s White Christmas (San Francisco, Detroit, Toronto), The Women at The Old Globe, Henry V at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, I Do, I Do at Westport Country Playhouse, She Loves Me at the Willliamstown Theatre Festival, and The Music Man and South Pacific at Arena Stage, earning a Helen Hayes Award nomination.
Emily Borromeo
*
Emily Borromeo is originally from the Bay Area, California, graduated from Brown University, and now resides in New York City. At the moment she is probably eating chips and avocado, drinking kombucha, and petting her dog, Kona. Recent credits: Angie Dickinson in the First National Tour of The Prom, School of Rock (Broadway & First National Tour), Broadway Bounty Hunter (New York Premier; composer Joe Iconis), Gloria: A Life (American Repertory Theater). Television: Emmy-nominated Sunny Side Up, a preschool morning show (Sprout/NBCUniversal), Sneaky Pete (Amazon Prime), Tell Me a Story (CBS), Jim Gaffigan Show (TVLand), The Sing Off (NBC).
Kennedy Caughell
*
Kennedy Caughell is a highly successful musical performer, who was educated in the performing arts before moving on to an exciting career across multiple platforms. By her own account, Caughell has always been willing to try something new, and this led to a love of theatre and film and a raft of impressive credits. Caughell performed throughout high school and in her BFA Music Theatre training at Elon University, before performing across the nation and abroad as Heather in American Idiot. Since then, she has been seen in multiple regional theatres and New York’s NYMF Festival. Caughell moved on to appear in a wide variety of different productions, including Paradise Square, Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, and Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. Throughout her career, Caughell has always received excellent critical responses, and this has helped her build her impressive list of credits. Another major role that Caughell landed was in the National tour of Wicked, where she played Elphaba to packed crowds across the United States. Caughell currently resides in New York City, where she occasionally teaches and performs in various shows and concerts at 54 Below, the Laurie Beechman, and the Duplex.
Katie Thompson
*
Katie Thompson is an actress and singer-songwriter. She was last seen as Aunt Eller in Oklahoma on Broadway, in the world premiere of Renascence by Carmel Dean and Dick Scanlan, and R.R.R.E.D., a Secret Musical to which she wrote the music and lyrics. Other roles include: Vashti in Giant by Michael John LaChiusa & Sybille Pearson at The Public Theater NYC, The Witch in the world premiere of Big Fish by Andrew Lippa & John August at The Oriental Theater Chicago, & Rhetta Cup in Pump Boys & Dinettes at The City Center in NYC. She has been a featured composer in Playbill’s “The Contemporary Musical Theater,” “Songwriters You Should Know,” and “It’s Revving Up –The Next Generation of Female Songwriters…” columns, and performance series at Feinstein’s 54Below, Lincoln Center’s New Contemporary Songbook series, as well as their annual Broadway’s Future Songbook series featuring original Christmas songs. Her original music and reimagined covers from her solo albums: Private Page, KT LIVE, and What I’ve Done Right have been featured on So You Think You Can Dance America, Canada, and the U.K. She is currently working on a new Christmas musical and solo album. In addition to her solo albums, she is featured on several contemporary composers’ albums, including Dreaming Wide Awake by Scott Alan, Here for You by Jonathan Reid Gealt, and Our First Mistake by Kerrigan & Lowdermilk. Her favorite experiences include playing cards in the green room at The Public Theatre in New York and singing for First Lady Michelle Obama.
Meet the Team
MAESTRA
*
MAESTRA provides support, visibility, and community to the women and nonbinary people who make the music in the musical theater industry. Our membership is made up of composers, music directors, orchestrators, arrangers, copyists, rehearsal pianists and other musicians. The organization’s initiatives include monthly educational seminars, mentorship programs, technical skills workshops, networking events, and online resources and partnerships that aim to promote equality of opportunity and to address the many historical disadvantages and practices that have limited women and nonbinary composers and musicians in the musical theater.
Zoe Sarnak
*
Zoe Sarnak is an award-winning composer and lyricist. Her work has been developed and produced at Second Stage, New York Stage & Film, The Public, Roundabout Theatre Company, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Geffen Playhouse, New York Theatre Workshop, 5th Avenue Theatre, Barrington Stage Company, Hermitage Artist Retreat, Guggenheim, MCC, and many others, and featured by the NY Times Live, The Shannara Chronicles (Spike), Silent Witness (BBC) and in benefit concerts and albums for Everytown.
All Together Now
*
All Together Now is an independently owned, women and minority-led studio devoted to Live Digital™️ shows and experiences. Since 2013, we've been creating live shows that stream to digital audiences in order to amplify world-changing people and stories, build owned communities beyond social media, create new lines of revenue for companies and influencers and drive radical accessibility for all of us who gather around the things we love.
The company is founded and led by award winning creator-director of live shows on stage and screen, Jessica Ryan. She pioneered delivering Broadway to Live Digital audiences a decade ago and continues to collaborate with select Broadway productions in order to translate the boldest and brightest shows (and their excellence) to digital audiences.
All Together Now's work encompasses the creation and strategy for scalable, repeating Live Digital shows as well as one night only Live Digital events. They bring together the brand, production and technology partners necessary to create experiences for Live Digital audiences that are light years ahead of the competition.
Pre-Show Snack or
Post-Show Dinner?
Don’t let the evening end when the curtain comes down. With The Marquee Local, you can find the perfect place for a pre-show snack, an evening meal, or a post-show cocktail. Enjoy exclusive deals from our local partners as you catch up, discuss the show, and create memories to last a lifetime.
Grab a Bite
Raise a Glass
While You Wait
With the help of our friends at Theatrely.com, Marquee Digital has you covered with exclusive content while you wait for the curtain to rise.
EXCLUSIVE: Watch A Clip From THEATER CAMP Starring Ben Platt, Noah Galvin, and Molly Gordon
Finally, summer has arrived, which can only mean one thing: it's time for camp! Theater Camp, that is. Theatrely has a sneak peak at the new film which hits select theaters today.
The new original comedy starring Tony Award winner Ben Platt and Molly Gordon we guarantee will have you laughing non-stop. The AdirondACTS, a run-down theater camp in upstate New York, is attended by theater-loving children who must work hard to keep their beloved theater camp afloat after the founder, Joan, falls into a coma.
The film stars Ben Platt and Molly Gordon as Amos Klobuchar and Rebecca-Diane, respectively, as well as Noah Galvin as Glenn Wintrop, Jimmy Tatro as Troy Rubinsky, Patti Harrison as Caroline Krauss, Nathan Lee Graham as Clive DeWitt, Ayo Edebiri as Janet Walch, Owen Thiele as Gigi Charbonier, Caroline Aaron as Rita Cohen, Amy Sedaris as Joan Rubinsky, and Alan Kim as Alan Park.
Theater Camp was directed by Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman and written by Noah Galvin, Molly Gordon, Nick Lieberman & Ben Platt. Music is by James McAlister and Mark Sonnenblick. On January 21, 2023, Theater Camp had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.
You can purchase tickets to the new film from our friends at Hollywood.com here.
READ: An Excerpt From Sean Hayes Debut YA Novel TIME OUT
Actor Sean Hayes is what we in the biz call booked and blessed. On top of his Tony-nominated performance as Oscar Levant in Good Night, Oscar, Hayes has partnered with Todd Milliner and Carlyn Greenwald for the release of their new YA novel Time Out.
Heralded by many as Heartstopper meets Friday Night Lights, Time Out follows hometown basketball hero Barclay Elliot who decides to use a pep rally to come out to his school. When the response is not what he had hoped and the hostility continually growing, he turns to his best friend Amy who brings him to her voting rights group at school. There he finds Christopher and… you will just have to grab a copy and find out what happens next. Luckily for you, Time Out hits shelves on May 30 and to hold you over until then we have a special except from the book just for Theatrely:
The good thing about not being on the team the past two weeks has been that I’ve had time to start picking up shifts again at Beau’s diner and save up a little for college now that my scholarship dreams are over.
The bad part is it’s the perfect place to see how my actions at the pep rally have rotted the townspeople’s brains too.
During Amy’s very intense musical theater phase in middle school, her parents took her to New York City. And of course she came back home buzzing about Broadway and how beautiful the piss smell was and everything artsy people say about New York. But she also vividly described some diner she waited three hours to get into where the waitstaff would all perform songs for the customers as a way to practice for auditions. The regulars would have favorite staff members and stan them the way Amy stans all her emo musicians.
Working at Beau’s used to feel kind of like that, like I was part of a performance team I didn’t know I signed up for. The job started off pretty basic over the summer—I wanted to save up for basketball supplies, and Amy worked there and said it was boring ever since her e-girl coworker friend graduated. But I couldn’t get through a single lunch rush table without someone calling me over and wanting the inside scoop on the Wildcats and how we were preparing for the home opener, wanting me to sign an article in the paper or take a photo. Every friendly face just made the resolve grow inside me. People love and support the Wildcats; they would do the same for me.
Yeah, right.
Now just like school, customers have been glaring at me, making comments about letting everyone down, about being selfish, about my actions being “unfortunate,” and the tips have been essentially nonexistent. The Wildcats have been obliterated in half their games since I quit, carrying a 2–3 record when last year we were 5–0, and the comments make my feet feel like lead weights I have to drag through every shift.
Today is no different. It’s Thursday, the usual dinner rush at Beau’s, and I try to stay focused on the stress of balancing seven milkshakes on one platter. A group of regulars, some construction workers, keep loudly wondering why I won’t come back to the team while I refuse proper eye contact.
One of the guys looks up at me as I drop the bill off. “So, what’s the deal? Does being queer keep ya from physically being able to play?”
They all snicker as they pull out crumpled bills. I stuff my hands into my pockets, holding my tongue.
When they leave, I hold my breath as I take their bill.
Sure enough, no tip.
“What the fuck?” I mutter under my breath.
“Language,” Amy says as she glides past me, imitating the way Richard says it to her every shift, and adds, “even though they are dicks.” At least Amy’s been ranting about it every free chance she gets. It was one thing when the student body was being shitty about me leaving the team, but the town being like this is even more infuriating. She doesn’t understand how these fully grown adults can really care that much about high school basketball and thinks they need a new fucking hobby. I finally agree with her.
[She’s wearing red lipstick to go with her raccoon-adjacent eyeliner as she rushes off to prepare milkshakes for a pack of middle schoolers. I catch her mid–death glare as all three of the kids rotate in their chairs, making the old things squeal. My anger fades a bit as I can’t help but chuckle; Amy’s pissed-off reaction to Richard telling her to smile more was said raccoon makeup, and her tolerance for buffoonery has been at a negative five to start and declining fast.
I rest my arms on the counter and try not to look as exhausted as I feel.
“Excuse me!” an old lady screeches, making me jump.
Amy covers up a laugh as I head to the old lady and her husband’s table. They’ve got finished plates, full waters. Not sure what the problem is. Or I do, which is worse.
“Yes?” I say trying to suppress my annoyance.
“Could you be bothered to serve us?”
Only five more hours on shift. I have a break in three minutes. I’ll be with Devin at Georgia Tech tomorrow. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” I say, so careful to keep my words even, but I can feel my hands balling into fists. “What would you—?”
And suddenly Amy swoops in, dropping two mugs of coffee down. “Sorry about that, you two,” she says, her voice extra high. “The machine was conking out on us, but it’s fine now.”
Once the coffee is down, she hooks onto a chunk of my shirt, steering us back to the bar.
“Thanks,” I mutter, embarrassed to have forgotten something so basic. Again.
“Just keep it together, man,” she says. “Maybe you’d be better off with that creepy night shift where all the truckers and serial killers come in.”
Honestly, at least the serial killers wouldn’t care about my jump shot.
It’s a few minutes before my break, but clearly I need it. “I’ll be in the back room.”
Right before I can head that way though, someone straight-up bursts into the diner and rushes over to me at the bar. It’s a middle-aged dad type, sunburned skin, beer belly, and stained T-shirt.
“Pickup order?” I ask.
“You should be ashamed,” he sneers at me. He has a really strong Southern accent, but it’s not Georgian. “Think you’re so high and mighty, that nothing’ll ever affect you? My kid’ll never go to college because of you and your lifestyle. Fuck you, Barclay Ell—”
And before this man can finish cursing my name, Pat of all people runs in, wide-eyed in humiliation. “Jesus, Dad, please don’t—”
I pin my gaze on him, remembering how he cowered on the bench as Ostrowski went off, how he didn’t even try to approach me. “Don’t even bother,” I snap.
I shove a to-go bag into his dad’s arms, relieved it’s prepaid, and storm off to the break room.]
Amy finds me head in my arms a minute or two later. I look up, rubbing my eyes. “Please spare me the pity.”
She snorts and hands me a milkshake. Mint chocolate chip. “Wouldn’t dare.” She takes a seat and rolls her shoulders and neck, cracks sounding through the tiny room. “Do you want a distraction or a shoulder to cry on?”
For more information, and to purchase your copy of Time Out, click here.
Reframing the COVID-19 Pandemic Through a Stage Manager’s Eyes
When the COVID-19 pandemic was declared a national emergency in the United States in March 2020, Broadway veteran stage manager Richard Hester watched the nation’s anxiety unfold on social media.
“No one knew what the virus was going to do,” Hester said. Some people were “losing their minds in abject terror, and then there were some people who were completely denying the whole thing.”
For Hester, the reaction at times felt like something out of a movie. “It was like the Black Plague,” he said. “Some people thought it was going to be like that Monty Python sketch: ‘bring out your dead, bring out your dead.’”
While Hester was also unsure about how the virus would unfold, he felt that his “job as a stage manager is to naturally defuse drama.” Hester brought this approach off the stage and onto social media in the wake of the pandemic.
“I just sort of synthesized everything that was happening into what I thought was a manageable bite, so people could get it,” Hester said. This became a daily exercise for a year. Over two years after the beginning of the pandemic, Hester’s accounts are compiled in the book, Hold Please: Stage Managing A Pandemic. Released earlier this year, the book documents the events of the past two years, filtering national events and day-to-day occurrences through a stage manager’s eyes and storytelling.
When Hester started this project, he had no intention of writing a book. He was originally writing every day because there was nothing else to do. “I am somebody who needs a job or needs a structure,” Hester said.
Surprised to find that people began expecting his daily posts, he began publishing his daily writing to his followers through a Substack newsletter. As his following grew, Hester had to get used to writing for an audience. “I started second guessing myself a lot of the time,” Hester said. “It just sort of put a weird pressure on it.”
Hester said he got especially nervous before publishing posts in which he wrote about more personal topics. For example, some of his posts focused on his experiences growing up in South Africa while others centered on potentially divisive topics, such as the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Despite some of this discomfort, Hester’s more personal posts were often the ones that got the most response. The experience offered him a writing lesson. “I stopped worrying about the audience and just wrote what I wanted to write about,” Hester said. “All of that pressure that I think as artists we put on ourselves, I got used to it.”
One of Hester’s favorite anecdotes featured in the book centers on a woman who dances in Washington Square Park on a canvas, rain or shine. He said he was “mesmerized by her,” which inspired him to write about her. “It was literally snowing and she was barefoot on her canvas dancing, and that seems to me just a spectacularly beautiful metaphor for everything that we all try and do, and she was living that to the fullest.”
During the creation of Hold Please, Hester got the unique opportunity to reflect in-depth on the first year of the pandemic by looking back at his accounts. He realized that post people would not remember the details of the lockdown; people would “remember it as a gap in their lives, but they weren’t going to remember it beat by beat.”
“Reliving each of those moments made me realize just how full a year it was, even though none of us were doing anything outside,” he adds. “We were all on our couches.” Readers will use the book as a way to relive moments of the pandemic’s first year “without having to wallow in the misery of it,” he hopes.
“I talk about the misery of it, but that’s not the focus of what I wrote... it was about hope and moving forward,” Hester said. “In these times when everything is so difficult, we will figure out a way to get through and we will move forward.”
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Let's Connect
Theatre is all about connection. Follow us to keep in touch and stay up to date on all the latest news!
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Theatre is all about connection. Follow us to keep in touch and stay up to date on all the latest news!
Waiting for the Show to Start?
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