twice won the Tony Award for his books to the hit musical Hello Dolly! and Bye, Bye Birdie and co-authored several other hit Broadway shows including 42nd Street and Barnum. Besides Mack & Mabel, his works include Those That Play the Clowns, I Love My Wife, George M!, The Grand Tour, Carnival and Harrigan ‘N Hart.
first burst on the Broadway scene as its youngest creator of music and lyrics with the successful Milk and Honey and was nominated for a Tony Award and a Grammy Award, winning Station WPAT’s Gaslight Award for Best Song of 1961. With the phenomenal Hello Dolly! (1964) he won both the Tony Award, Variety’s Best Composer and Best Lyricist Award, a Gold Record and a Grammy Award. Mame (1966) won another Best Lyricist Award, Gold Record and Grammy. With Dear World (1969) he had three musicals running simultaneously on Broadway. Mack & Mabel (1974), his personal favorite score, and The Grand Tour (1978) followed and he contributed songs to A Day in Hollywood, A Night in the Ukraine (1980). With La Cage Aux Folles (1983) he won the Tony for Outstanding Music and Lyrics and the Drama Desk Award for Best Score for a Musical. Jerry’s Girls, a revue of his life’s work, has played on Broadway, as well as every other major American city. He has been elected into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame and the Theater Hall of Fame. Jerry was presented with the Johnny Mercer Award in 1987 and the Richard Rodgers Award in 1998. He is the only composer/lyricist to have had three musicals which each ran 1,500 consecutive performances on Broadway. Jerry believes in writing melodic songs that can have lives of their own outside the show.
collaborated with her husband, John Pascal and her brother, Michael Stewart, on the Broadway musical George M!, in 1968, which was revived this year at Goodspeed. In the early eighties she created the book and television series, Sweet Valley High, which has sold more than one hundred and fifty million copies worldwide in twenty-five languages. Her latest adult novel is If Wishes Were Horses. Her new series, Fearless, is being published by Pocket Books and has been bought for television by Columbia TriStar. She has just finished a new musical with David Bryan of Bon Jovi called Fastbreaks – the Comings and Goings at Sweet Valley High.
was orchestrator/conductor on Broadway for Noel Coward’s Sail Away and Richard Rodgers’ No Strings; he created orchestrations for Jule Styne’s Hallelujah Baby and more recently Tommy Tune’s Grand Hotel; on records Matz has arranged, conducted and produced albums for Rosemary Clooney, Tony Bennett, Dionne Warwick, Melissa Manchester, Kiri te Kanawa, Nancy La Mott, Barbra Streisand and recently he arranged Barbara Cook’s recordings of songs with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein. On TV, Peter was arranger/conductor for Carol Burnett’s long-running series, and composed scores for more than fifty TV movies, as well as many feature films (Sidney Lumet’s Bye Bye Braverman is still Matz’s favorite). Most recently, Matz composed the music for The Gorey Details, which opened at the Century Center Theater in New York on October 16th. Peter and his wife, actress/singer/ psychotherapist Marilynn Lovell are active fund-raisers for APLA, Shanti Foundation, Aid for AIDS and other local AIDS organizations; the CD of their show “Say It With Music”, recorded live in New York, is available on the “Original Cast Records” label. Matz has been musical director of all the REPRISE! musicals since its inception.
Recent Theatre: Carousel (Hollywood Bowl), The Most Happy Fella (New York City Opera), Of Thee I Sing, The Boys From Syracuse (REPRISE!) The Sisters (Pasadena Playhouse), Gypsy Princess (Opera Pacific), Madama Butterfly (Santa Barbara Grand Opera). Other Broadway and off-Broadway shows include Billy, Vieux Carre, Awake and Sing, Ceremony of Innocence and Hamp. Recent Films: The Runaway (Hallmark Hall of Fame), By Dawn’s Early Light (Showtime), The Summer of Ben Tyler, Harvest of Fire, Grace and Glorie (all for Hallmark Hall of Fame), Miracle in the Woods (CBS), A Friendship in Vienna (Disney), Sex and Mrs. X (Lifetime), Walking Across Egypt, Poker Alice (CBS), The Kid Who Loved Christmas (Paramount), Kate’s Secret (NBC), Body Language, Dying to Remember and Trapped in Space (USA Network). Awards: Two Emmy Awards, five Emmy nominations, Peabody, Humanitas, Grand Prize—New York Film and TV Festival, three Christopher Awards, Writers Guild Award, Drama Desk nomination, Burns Mantle Award, Nancy Susan Reynolds Award, Ovation Award nomination, awards from Chicago, San Francisco, Palm Springs, Heartland and Marco Island Film Festival.
has been associated with film, Broadway and corporate theater for many years. His work has won him several prestigious Tony and Drama Desk Award nominations, as well as critical acclaim. His fifteen year tenure, first as choreographer then as associate artistic director, of the Tony award winning Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut, launched a long string of productions, directed and/or choreographed by Siretta, which went on to Broadway, London or successful tours. Cited by critics as Goodspeed’s moving force, these Broadway shows included the original production of Annie, Oh Kay!, Whoopee (Tony nominations for both), Going Up, Tip Toes and Oh Kay! (Drama Desk Nomination for all three), Very Good Eddie, The Five O’Clock Girl, Little Johnny Jones, Take Me Along and Lady Be Good. Other Broadway credits include, Allen J. Lerner’s Lolita My Love, The Most Happy Fella (Arthur Allan Seidelman director) and the current Borscht Belt Buffet. For film and television, Siretta choreographed the Academy Award winning Children of a Lesser God, the Emmy Award winning PBS’s Great Performance Celebrating Gershwin in which he staged three ballets to Gershwin preludes for Mikhail Baryshnikov and Those Lips, Those Eyes. He is married to Nikki Sahagen and is father to Matthew and Lilli.
This is Mr. Wissmann’s third design for REPRISE!, the others being The Boys From Syracuse and last season’s production of Of Thee I Sing. He has designed for The Pasadena Playhouse, the La Mirada Performing Arts Center, The Westwood Playhouse, South Bay Civic Light Opera, The Tiffany, The Colony, The Odyssey, The Beverly Hills Playhouse, The Ivy Substation, The Matrix and Coconut Playhouse, Florida. He has also worked as Set Designer for the Rogue Music Theatre, Oregon, and is the Resident Set Designer for The Ensemble Theatre Company of Santa Barbara. He has received numerous Drama-Logue Awards and the NAACP Theatre Award for Set Design for the musical Sisterella. He resides in Pasadena with his wife Shelley, and their co-designs, Michael and Joanna.
began a long term association with Fiesta Parade Floats & The Tournament of Roses Parade in 1987. As the resident designer for Southern California Music Theater credits include Gypsy starring Joanne Worley, No No Nanette, West Side Story and Singing in the Rain. Original productions include Hurry, Hurry Hollywood, James A. Michner’s Sayonara, and Fame - the Musical. Other credits include Last of the Red Hot Lovers, Dear Emma, Nobody Hears a Broken Drum, Elegies, Stephen Sondheim’s The Frogs, BABES and Beehive in Las Vegas. As the resident designer for The Fireside Theater, design credits include, I Do, I Do, Camelot, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, The Will Rogers Follies, Crazy for You, Fiddler on the Roof, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Brigadoon, Once Upon a Mattress and their last six Christmas spectaculars. Scott worked closely with the design team on an original musical adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In 1997, Scott ran away with director Philip Wm. McKinley and joined the design team for the 128th edition of Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus designing over 300 costumes for people and elephants!. Most recently, Scott designed costumes for Michelle Kwan’s ice skating competitions and a television special titled Michelle Kwan Skates to Disney’s Greatest Hits.
has enjoyed creating lighting for many varied productions and architectural spaces. For REPRISE!, Tom has designed Finian’s Rainbow, The Pajama Game, The Threepenny Opera, Of Thee I Sing, Sweeney Todd, Bells Are Ringing, The Boys From Syracuse, and Fiorello! He has designed over 75 productions for South Coast Repertory and shows for the Mark Taper Forum, International City Theatre, and The Palm Springs Follies. His designs can be seen at theme parks in 6 different countries including Universal Studios Hollywood, Universal’s Islands of Adventure Orlando, Warner Bros. MovieWorld, Paramount’s Star Trek World Tour, and Knott’s Berry Farm. His architectural lighting can be seen at Santa Monica Place, South Coast Plaza Mall, Orange County Performing Arts Center, the Los Angeles Music Center and many other shopping malls, restaurants, churches, residences and Las Vegas casinos and hotels. Other professional associations include the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and Sacramento Music Theatre. Mr. Ruzika is also head of the Graduate Lighting Design Program at U.C. Irvine.
has designed over 70 theatrical shows, including Measure for Measure, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Cinderella at the Ahmanson, First Picture Show at the Taper, and the first three seasons of REPRISE! Other work includes Play On, and Only A Kingdom (Pasadena Playhouse); Masada (Shubert Theatre in LA); Joseph…, and Singing in the Rain (Denver’s Arvada Center for the Arts); Forever Plaid, and Blues in the Night, (Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami); and The King and I, South Pacific, and Into the Woods (Long Beach CLO). For television Mr. Allen assisted in the sound system design for the 1998 Academy of Country Music Awards with Emmy Award winning sound designer Bruce Burns, and equalized the sound at the 56th Golden Globe Awards and 14th Soap Opera Awards. As a mixer he just completed 8 months as Production Sound Engineer with the national tour of Titanic, and last year he engineered the gala production Saturday Night at the Summit attended by Bill Clinton and the leaders of the G-7 countries. He won the 1999 L.A. Drama Critics Circle Award for Cinderella, five L.A. Drama-Logue Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Design, and an Ovation Award nomination for Best Sound Design in a Large Musical.