News

March 3, 2015

Master Class and Interview with Broadway Composer Paul Bogaev at Lewis Center

Grammy and Emmy Award-winning musical director, arranger, conductor and composer Paul Bogaev will give a master class followed by an interview for Princeton students on Tuesday, March 10 as part of Professor of Theater Stacy Wolf’s spring course, “Isn’t It Romantic? The Broadway Musical from Rodgers and Hammerstein to Sondheim.” The course explores the Broadway musical with a focus on gender and sexuality. It examines the musical’s unique conventions of aesthetics and form, and its status as popular entertainment that shapes and is shaped by its historical and cultural context. Bogaev’s master class will begin at 1:30 p.m. in Room 219 at 185 Nassau Street and is free and open to the public to observe.

paul bogaev

Photo courtesy Paul Bogaev

Bogaev is a multi award-winning artist whose film credits include the Oscar-winning Chicago, for which he won a Grammy Award; Nine; Dreamgirls, starring Jamie Foxx, Beyoncé Knowles, Eddie Murphy and Jennifer Hudson; Across the Universe; and the Disney films Mulan, The Lion King, and The Emperor’s New Groove. Among his many Broadway credits are Elton John and Tim Rice’s Aida, for which he won his first Grammy; Tarzan; Bombay Dreams, for which he was nominated for a Tony Award; Sunset Boulevard; Chess; Cats; Starlight Express; Les Miserables; and most recently, Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark.

Bogaev also served as music director of the ABC-TV musicals Cinderella, South Pacific, and Annie, for which he won an Emmy Award. He has worked with a number of pop, film, and theater stars over the course of his career, including Sting, Phil Collins, Bono, Barbra Streisand, Whitney Houston, Hugh Jackman, Richard Gere, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Penelope Cruz, Keith Urban, and Fergie. As a symphony conductor, he conducted the music for Francis Ford Coppola’s presentation of the silent film epic Napoleon with major orchestras around the world.

Wolf’s class will host four additional guests throughout the semester. On March 24, arts administrator and producer Howard Sherman will give a talk followed by a question and answer session. Doug Reside, curator of the Billy Rose Theater Collection at the New York Public Library will speak about the resources of the Library on March 25. On April 7, Paul Bogaev will return for a conversation with Thomas Schumacher, theatrical producer and current president of Disney Theatrical Group. Finally, on April 14, the class will host a master class and conversation with Judith Clurman, Emmy and Grammy-nominated conductor, educator, and choral specialist.

Wolf is a professor of theater and director of the Princeton Arts Fellows in the Lewis Center where she teaches courses in American musical theatre history, dramaturgy and dramatic literature, histories of U.S. performance, performance theory, and performance studies. Wolf is the author of Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical; A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical; and the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical. She has published articles on theatre spectatorship, performance pedagogy, and musical theatre in many journals, including Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, and Camera Obscura. She was the editor of Theatre Topics: A Journal of Pedagogy and Praxis from 2001 to 2003. She also directs the Lewis Center’s Music Theater Lab and has experience as a theater director and dramaturg.

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