Broadway producer David Stone will discuss his career and work on Wicked and other hit musicals in a conversation with Professor of Theater Stacy Wolf and her students as part of her spring course “Race and the American Musical Theater, from Minstrelsy to Hamilton.” The discussion will take place on Tuesday, March 14 at 1:30 p.m. in Room 219 at 185 Nassau Street. Presented by the Lewis Center’s Program in Music Theater and co-sponsored by Princeton’s Program in American Studies, the event is free and open to the public.
Wolf’s course examines race as a key component of Broadway musical theater, exploring musicals from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s blockbusters In the Heights and Hamilton. Students analyze scripts, critical articles, albums, and performances to understand how race and ethnicity structure the aesthetic and politics of American theater. The semester includes trips to New York City to visit the archives at the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center and to see a musical.
David Stone, Broadway producer of such hits as Wicked, Next to Normal and War Paint. Photo courtesy Playbill
In addition to Wicked, David Stone is the producer of Broadway hits such as Next to Normal, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, If/Then, and The Diary of Anne Frank, as well as Off-Broadway successes such as The Vagina Monologues. He is a producer on the new musical currently in previews, War Paint, starring Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole. Stone has been nominated for five Tony Awards, with Next to Normal garnering three Tonys and the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of the 2004 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Musical for Wicked. Stone serves on the Board of Governors of The Broadway League, as well as on the Board of Trustees of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights Aids. He has lectured at Columbia University, Yale University, the Juilliard School, New York University, and the University of Pennsylvania, his alma mater.
Wolf teaches courses in American musical theater history, dramaturgy and dramatic literature, histories of U.S. performance, performance theory, and performance studies. She is the author of Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (recently named one of the “top ten books every theater lover should read” by Marissa Friedman); A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical; and the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical. She is currently working on Beyond Broadway: Four Seasons of Amateur Musical Theatre in the U.S., which examines amateur musical theater at high schools, summer camps, community centers, and afterschool programs across the country. Wolf is also director of the Princeton Arts Fellows program in the Lewis Center.
Wolf’s course recently hosted dramaturg and Literary Manager for Disney Theatrical Group Ken Cerniglia, and on April 11, Broadway performer Arielle Jacobs will present a master class and engage in conversation about her performances in Aladdin, In the Heights, and other productions.
The new Program in Music Theater is a collaboration among the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Theater and Program in Dance and the Department of Music, which brings together students, faculty, and guest artists in the creation, study, and performance of music theater to support and develop all forms of music theater—that is, any theatrical form that combines singing, acting, and movement—as both an artistic practice and a field of scholarly study.
