All About Steve
I’ve been making theatre happen in NYC as a director, writer, and producer since The Year 2000, having served as the Founding Artistic Director of both Personal Space Theatrics and The Queensborough Theatre Project.
I create innovative, ensemble-driven immersive works that consciously double-down on theatre’s basic need for direct, barrier-free communion between all of its core elements: performers, text, space, design, and audience.
I believe that theatre will become more essential to our culture when we seek, discover, confront, embrace, and prove the full potential of its singular nature, its theatricality.
I’m also really into having a good time at work.
My major influences are the works and ideas of Richard Schechner, Trevor Nunn, Peter Brook, and Gary Izzo.
In the summer of 2020, I, along with Tony-nominated producer Blair Russell (Slave Play), founded Resounding, a live immersive theatre and entertainment production company.
To date, we’ve created six new immersive audio works, including the first new play to open before a live audience since the pandemic shutdown, the unauthorized parody in verse, Clu-eth (starring Manu Narayan, Brian Charles Rooney, and Thom Sesma). Other Resounding projects include the World Premiere ghost play Beyond the Veil (starring Montego Glover and Quentin Earl Darrington), and adaptations of Dracula (starring Norm Lewis), Treasure Island (starring Rob McClure and Maggie Lakis), Nutcracker (starring Telly Leung and Storm Lever), and The Tempest (starring Sesame Street’s Sonia Manzano).
My work spans from new and traditional musicals to the avant garde fringe to environmental/immersive works.
Favorite credits include (as director): the immersive concert experience Kabarett Weimar; seven NYC productions of his musical adaptation (with Dianne Adams McDowell) of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”; David Ives’ Don Juan in Chicago (first NYC revival); The Duchess, aka Wallis Simpson and Orchidelirium (both U.S. premieres).
As writer: Triassic Parq: The Musical (with Marshall Pailet and Bryce Norbitz) (NYC Fringe Best Musical ’10; Off Broadway ’12: Lortel Nom.; L.A. ’13: 11 Ovation Award Noms, Winner: Best Musical; San Franciso ’14: 8 SGBATCC Noms; Published and licensed by Broadway Licensing.); Scooby-Doosical with Keith Varney; Nighttime Traffic with Alex Wyse.
As producer: Keith Varney’s I Got Fired: A Revenge Musical (with Liz Ulmer, dir. Steve Bebout, NYMF ’10; Theater for the American Musical Award; South Korea’s Daegu International Musical Festival ’11); the late, great Arthur Kopit’s revised BecauseHeCan (first NYC revival, dir. Nicholas Cotz).
In theater-adjacent work, I’ve lectured on “A Christmas Carol” at Brooklyn College and my essay, “Journey On,” on how the AIDS crisis impacted the development of the American Musical, was published in the trade journal “Musical Theater Today”. A proud New Yorker and Member of the Dramatists Guild, I grew up in Pittsburgh, PA, and earned my BFA in Musical Theater from Syracuse University.
