I am a theatre scholar, educator, and director.
I earned my PhD from the Department of Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. I write about the aesthetics of musical theatre, Jewishness and Broadway musicals, pedagogical approaches to theatre courses, and the role of theatre practice in the academy. My dissertation is on the ways in which Broadway musicals in the second half of the twentieth century reflect the Jewishness of New York City’s Progressive Era. My research emphasizes the study of musical theatre aesthetics as a way to examine how the reoccurring themes and tropes in Broadway musicals recreate, reframe, and reclaim narratives of Jewish American cultural history and collective memory.
I teach musical theatre history, theatre history, acting, directing, and public speaking at many NYC colleges; I currently teach at Baruch College, Marymount Manhattan College, and NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. I work diligently to create interventionist, intersectional courses that are accessible for all students.
I direct new musicals, rarely produced musicals, and re-envisioned revivals of musicals wherein I uncover a new story while remaining loyal to the original text. I also cultivate opportunities for new musicals through Overtures, a new musical developmental reading series that I created and continue to curate.
I have recently completed a chapter, “'To Being an Us for Once, Instead of Them’: Musical Theatre Aesthetics and Youth-Oriented Musicals,” that will be published in the edited collection, Milestones in Musical Theatre. My article, “Glee and the Ghosting of the Musical Theatre Canon,” was published in Popular Entertainment Studies and then expanded into a chapter in the edited collection Queer in the Choir Room. I have written book reviews about formative texts in Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, and Studies in Musical Theatre. I regularly present my research at theatre conferences, including ATHE and ASTR.