Cast
Performer/Playwright
Hershey Felder
Hershey Felder has appeared on Broadway and London's West End in George Gershwin Alone. His regional and international appearances of the “Composers Sonata” 1999 - 2011 – George Gershwin Alone, Monsieur Chopin, Beethoven, As I Knew Him and Maestro: The Art of Leonard Bernstein – include The Old Globe, Asolo Repertory Theatre, Arizona Theatre Company, Geffen Playhouse, Laguna Playhouse, Ford’s Theatre, Cleveland Play House, Pasadena Playhouse, American Repertory Theater, Hartford Stage, Ravinia Festival, Chicago’s Royal George Theatre, Prince Music Theatre (Philadelphia), The Gilmore International Keyboard Festival, Uijeongbu Theatre Festival (South Korea) and many others. Command Performance of Monsieur Chopin for the Polish Ambassador to the United States, Polish Embassy, Washington. He is the winner of a 2007 Los Angeles Ovation Awards, Best Musical and Best Actor for George Gershwin Alone. His compositions include Aliyah, Concerto for Piano and Orchestra; Fairytale, a musical; Les Anges de Paris, Suite for Violin and Piano; Song Settings, poetry by Vachel Lindsay; Saltimbanques for Piano and Orchestra; Etudes Thematiques for Piano; An American Story for actor and orchestra. His recordings include Love Songs of the Yiddish Theatre, Back from Broadway, George Gershwin Alone and Monsieur Chopin for the WFMT Radio Network Recordings label, Beethoven, As I Knew Him and An American Story for the Eighty-Eight Entertainment label. George Gershwin Alone received a worldwide live broadcast in July 2005 and May 2011. Felder's current projects include a new musical, An American Story, which had its world premiere in LA in November 2009. It was recorded with the Ars Viva Symphony Orchestra, comprised of members of the Chicago Symphony and Chicago Lyric Opera Orchestras and conducted by Alan Heath.
Team
Director
Joel Zwick
Joel Zwick directed My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the highest-grossing romantic comedy of all time, produced by Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson and Gary Goetzman. His recent films include Fat Albert (with Bill Cosby) and Elvis Has Left the Building starring John Corbett and Kim Basinger. Zwick directed the Broadway production of George Gershwin Alone at the Helen Hayes Theatre as well as all other productions of the show. Zwick began his theatrical career at La Mama E.T.C. as director of the La Mama Plexus. He has directed on Broadway, Off Broadway and Broadway touring companies. Currently, Zwick is recognized as one of Hollywood’s most prolific directors of episodic television, having the direction of more than 525 episodes to his credit. His previous New York productions have included Dance with Me (Tony Award nomination), Shenandoah (Broadway National Tour), Oklahoma (National Tour) and Cold Storage (American Place Theater). He acted in the original New York production of MacBird. He also directed Esther (Promenade Theater), Merry-Go-Round (Chicago and Las Vegas) and Last Chance Saloon and Woycek (West End). Zwick has taught drama at Yale University, Brooklyn College, Queens College, Wheaton College and the University of Southern California. He is currently in pre-production on Sleepless in Seattle – the Musical and Serrano. He recently directed Jamaica Farewell for Falcon Theatre and is busy directing television shows for It's a Laugh Productions.
Scenic Design/Lighting Design/Projection Design
Francois-Pierre Couture
François-Pierre Couture (Scenic Design/Lighting Design/Projection Design, Maestro) moved from Montréal to UCLA to complete his Master’s degree in scenic and lighting design in 2006. He then joined The Actors’ Gang Theatre and designed the scenery and lighting for the critically acclaimed production of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. He was also nominated for an Ovation Award for his scenic design of A Picasso at the Geffen Playhouse, received a Garland Award for the scenery of The Quality of Life also at the Geffen Playhouse and was nominated for best scenic design at the 2010 LA Weekly Awards for Stranger at the Bootleg and received a Ticket Holder Award for best lighting design for Solitude at the LATC. Other productions he has designed include: Scenery for 1951-2006 written and directed by Donald Freed at the LATC; lighting for Dementia at the LATC; scenery for Beethoven, As I Knew Him at The Old Globe, Geffen Playhouse, Chicago Water Tower; lighting for Porphyrion’s Revenge at Highways Performance Space; scenery and lighting for KLÜB at The Actor’s Gang Theatre; scenery and lighting for Wounded, Spring Awakening and Survived at the Power House Theatre.
Lighting Director/Assistant Lighting Design
Margaret Hartmann
Margaret Hartmann has been designing in Chicago for seven years. She is a member of Plasticene Theatre Company and Big Picture Group Theatre Company and has designed at the Royal George Theatre, Provision Theatre Company, The Chicago Hip Hop Festival, Bailiwick Theatre and CIRCA Theatre Company. She has also associate designed Almost, Maine at Milwaukee Repertory’s Stiemke Theater and assisted designers at Goodman Theatre, Writers’ Theatre, Marriott Lincolnshire Theatre and Chicago Shakespeare Theater.
Sound Design
Erik Carstensen
Erik Carstensen has been the Master Sound Technician at The Old Globe since 1997. Production Engineer on over 60 productions at the Globe, including Floyd Collins, Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, The Full Monty, Dirty Blonde, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Chita Rivera—A Dancers Life, Hershey Felder’s George Gershwin Alone, Monsieur Chopin, Beethoven, As I Knew Him (sound design), A Catered Affair and Robin and the 7 Hoods. Erik is a member of IATSE Local 122.
Project Design
Andrew Wilder
Andrew Wilder and his experience in lighting design, photography and all things computerized have led to the world of projection and media design. He is thrilled to be working with the Eighty-Eight Entertainment team once again, after having had such a great time designing for Beethoven, As I Knew Him. When not working in a theatre, Andrew spends his time writing about diet and nutrition.
Production Stage Manager
GiGi Garcia
GiGi Garcia is one of the original stage managers for George Gershwin Alone and has called close to 1,000 performances for Eighty-Eight Entertainment. For 14 years, she has been a resident artist at A Noise Within where she has worked as a production manager, stage manager and assistant director. Other theatres include The Old Globe, Pasadena Playhouse, Geffen Playhouse, Cleveland Play House, Arizona Theatre Company, Laguna Playhouse, The Kennedy Center, The Hollywood Bowl, Drury Lane Water Tower Place – Chicago, Cuillo Center for the Performing Arts, L.A. Theatre Works, Tiffany Theatres, Occidental Theatre Festival, Bottom’s Dream, Eclectic Theatre Company, Virginia Avenue Project and Scottsdale Conservatory Theatre. Ms. Garcia currently leads the Drama Ministry for Montrose Church where she has produced and directed several plays and films.
Production Stage Manager
Nate Genung
Nate Genung has worked on Harps and Angels, The Subject Was Roses and Pippin (Mark Taper Forum) and Gigi, How to Succeed..., An Evening with Sutton Foster and A Party with Marty (Reprise). His other LA credits include Equivocation (Geffen Playhouse), Summer of Love (Musical Theatre West), Medea (UCLA Live), Ring of Fire (McCoy Rigby), The Kathy & Mo Show with Kathy Najimy and Mo Gaffney (Palm Springs Convention Center), world premieres of Life Could Be a Dream (Hudson Theatre), Norman’s Ark (Ford Amphitheatre) and Dawn’s Light (East West Players).
Production Manager/Technical Director
Matt Marsden
Matt Marsden is Owner/President of Resolution Productions. While Production Manager at the Royal George Chicago, he was part of the production teams for HATS! The Musical, Forbidden Broadway: SVU, I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, Bleacher Bums, Graham Norton: Red Handed and The Flying Karamazov Brothers. Working on his own for Resolution Productions, he has been part of the Eighty-Eight LLC production team for the World Premieres of Monsieur Chopin, Beethoven, As I Knew Him and Maestro: The Art of Leonard Bernstein. Resolution Productions has also been part of the teams for Chicago Children’s Theatre and Criterion Productions’ festival management in Chicago. Mr. Marsden’s career has included working for Olympic City at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. As a Project Manager for Chicago’s Becker Studios, he has worked on feature film PR campaigns, national conventions and trade shows and retail environments. In the theatre, he worked to open Chicago’s Drury Lane Theatre (at Water Tower Place) and production managed their inaugural show The Full Monty and then Mornings at Seven starring Katherine Helmond. He more recently managed Million Dollar Quartet’s Chicago production for AWA Management, Don’t Dress For Dinner in Chicago for The British Stage Company and White Noise co-produced by Whoopi Goldberg.
Musical History Consultant
Jeffrey Kallberg
Jeffrey Kallberg (Ph.D., University of Chicago; Associate Dean for Arts and Letters and Professor of Music History, University of Pennsylvania) is a specialist in music of the 19th and 20th centuries, editorial theory critical theory and gender studies. Kallberg has published widely on the music and cultural contexts of Chopin, most notably in his book, Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre (Harvard University Press). His critical edition of Luisa Miller, for The Works of Giuseppe Verdi, has been performed throughout the U.S. and internationally. His current projects include a book on Chopin and the culture of the nocturne, an examination of the convergences of sex and music around 1800, and a study of Scandinavian song in the first half of the 20th century. Kallberg was elected Vice President of the American Musicological Society for the term 2004-2006. He served as Review Editor of the Journal of American Musicological Society and is presently general editor of New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism (Cambridge University Press). He has won numerous awards for publications and received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has also twice been guest-of-honor at the International Fryderyk Chopin Competition in Warsaw, Poland. In 2005, the Palmer Theological Seminary called upon Kallberg to identify and authenticate an autographed manuscript of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge that was discovered in their library. The manuscript, one of the last that Beethoven completed, preserves fascinating evidence of his compositional thinking; its reappearance after some 115 years caused considerable excitement across the musical world. In December 2005, the manuscript sold at auction for nearly $1.9 million.
Associate Producer
Lee Kaufman
Lee Kaufman is a business entrepreneur with an interest in classical music that extends from Gregorian chants in the Middle Ages through to the modern composers. In the St. Louis community college system, he teaches a classical music listening course as well as one dealing with the role of music in the movies. He also teaches at the Chautauqua Institution in New York and Washington University in St. Louis, continuing education.
General Manager
Samantha F. Voxakis
Samantha is a proud native of Baltimore MD, where her twelve years with the Baltimore Orioles included a number of extraordinary events, including the opening of Camden Yards and Cal Ripken’s 2131 game. When not keeping busy with the day-to-day operations of 88LLC, she enjoys cooking, travel, and theatre. There was a time she took great pleasure in playing the piano; however, she has given it up as comparisons to Hershey’s playing are simply too painful. With special thanks to Mr. Felder, the GGA-MC LA, James, and The Family.
Producer
Eighty-Eight Entertainment, LLC
Eighty-Eight, LLC was created in 2001 by Hershey Felder and is devoted to the creation of new works of musical theatre. Eighty-Eight’s projects include the “Composer Sonata” featuring the lives and work of George Gershwin: George Gershwin Alone, Fryderyk Chopin: Monsieur Chopin, Ludwig van Beethoven: Beethoven, As I Knew Him and Leonard Bernstein: Maestro. Current projects include An American Story, a new musical based on a little-known story about President Lincoln’s final day. All members of Eighty-Eight LLC productions are creative artists in their own right, and all members are asked to advise and contribute on all aspects of production.
