Composer, playwright and pianist Andrew Gerle won the 2012 Kleban Award for outstanding librettist for his show GLORYANA, which also won a 2011 Richard Rodgers Award. He has also won three other Rodgers Awards for THE TUTOR (book and lyrics by Maryrose Wood). With lyricist Eddie Sugarman, he won a Jonathan Larson Award for their show, MEET JOHN DOE (cast album on Broadway Records), and he received the first Burton Lane Fellowship for Young Composers from the Theater Songwriters’ Hall of Fame. His play RENOVATIONS was premiered in 2011 at the White Plains (NY) Performing Arts Center, and selections from his opera THE BEACH (libretto by Royce Vavrek) were premiered by the New York City Opera as part of their VOX reading series. Recent projects include an adaptation of The Tempest with legendary lyricist Tom Jones (The Fantasticks) and a score for Barrington Stage Company’s production of Much Ado About Nothing.
Gerle has been a Fellow at MacDowell and a writer-in-residence at the Sundance Theater Institute at Ucross, the Rhinebeck Writers’ Retreat, and the Eugene O’Neill Musical Theatre Conference. As a musical director, he has worked on dozens of Off-Broadway, regional and touring productions, and was heard as the “hands” of Coalhouse Walker, Jr., in the recent Tony Award-winning revival of Ragtime. He has served as musical director and accompanist for such distinguished artists as Kitty Carlisle Hart, John Raitt, Jennifer Holliday, Shirley Jones, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Leslie Uggams and Liz Callaway. A CD of his jazz arrangements of the songs of Maltby & Shire with vocalist Christa Justus was released in 2010 under the PS Classics Label. He is the author of The Enraged Accompanist’s Guide to the Perfect Audition, which is becoming the go-to reference for professional and aspiring musical theater actors alike. He is on the faculty of Yale University, where he teaches musical theater performance and songwriting.
