Lauren Class Schneider
(Broadway Fantasy Camp Producer)
Lauren has been producing, directing, and stage-managing theatre, television and live events for almost 30 years. On Broadway, she produced High with Kathleen Turner, and Looped, for which Valerie Harper won a Tony Award® nomination as Best Leading Actress in a Play. For the past 15 seasons Lauren has produced the Drama Desk Awards and served on numerous Tony, Grammy, Daytime Emmy and Video Music Award telecasts. She has been the coordinating producer for Broadway Salutes, which honors professionals earning their living on Broadway for 25, 35, and 50 years. She was also a coordinating producer for the outdoor extravaganza celebrating Mamma Mia’s 10th anniversary on Broadway. For the past 3 seasons, she has produced the Gala for the American Theatre Wing, which presents the Tony Awards® along with The Broadway League. Past performers on the Wing Gala include Hugh Jackman, Kristen Chenoweth, Barbara Cook, Megan Mullally, Audra McDonald, Kelli O’Hara, Harry Connick Jr., Jennifer Hudson, James Naughton, Angela Lansbury, and Elaine Paige. Over the past three decades she has worked with such entertainment luminaries as James Earl Jones, Lily Tomlin, Patti LuPone, Patrick Stewart, Samuel L. Jackson, Bebe Neuwirth, Bernadette Peters, Chita Rivera, Harvey Fierstein, Brooke Shields, and Elaine Stritch.
Lauren is a member of The Broadway League and a voter for the Tony Awards ® and the Drama Desk Awards. She has been a guest lecturer in the graduate theatre programs at NYU and Yale. She is a featured video columnist with her series Class Notes, seen at BroadwayStars.com.
Rob Berman
Rob is a New York based conductor and music director. Rob’s many Broadway credits as conductor include the revival of Leonard Bernstein’s Wonderful Town; the Tony® Award winning production of The Pajama Game starring Harry Connick Jr.; the new stage adaptation of Irving Berlin’s White Christmas; and revivals of Finian’s Rainbow, The Apple Tree, and Promises, Promises. For six years, Rob has been music director of the Kennedy Center Honors, receiving four Emmy nominations. He was the music director of A Broadway Celebration: In Performance at the White House. He is the music director of Encores!, New York City Center’s acclaimed series. In five seasons, he has conducted celebrated revivals of Lane and Harburg’s Finian’s Rainbow, Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along and Anyone Can Whistle and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Pipe Dream. Rob won a Helen Hayes Award for his music direction of the Kennedy Center Sondheim Celebration’s production of Sunday in the Park With George and for Carnegie Hall, he was music director of Opening Doors, an original revue of Sondheim songs. Rob has conducted seven original cast recordings, including the recent Encores! productions of Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along and Jule Styne’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. He has had the privilege of working with legendary theater writers such as Sondheim, Kander and Ebb, Cy Coleman, Bock and Harnick, Charles Strouse and Richard Adler.
Marc Bruni
Marc has been the Associate Director for over a dozen critically acclaimed Broadway shows including Tony® Award winners Anything Goes, The Pajama Game and La Cage aux Folles, and Tony® nominees Nice Work If You Can Get It and Grease. He is also the Associate Director for the 2012 National Tour of Book of Mormon. Marc directed the City Center Encores! productions of Fanny and Pipe Dream, and was the Associate Director for Finian’s Rainbow, No, No, Nanette, Applause, 70, Girls 70, and Bye Bye Birdie as well as PBS Great Performances production of South Pacific at Carnegie Hall. Across the country he directed 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at Papermill Playhouse and Philadelphia Theatre Company, In the Mood at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, Pillow Talk/The Best Foot Half Forward in Williamstown, Legally Blonde in Ogunquit and the St. Louis Muny, and also at the St. Louis Muny The Sound of Music (Kevin Kline Award Nomination), The Music Man (Kevin Kline Award Nomination), My One and Only and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Off-Broadway he is the director of Old Jews Telling Jokes.
Elliott Forrest
Elliott is a Peabody Award winning broadcaster and producer. He produces large-scale symphonic concerts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Atlanta Symphony, The Pasadena Pops and the Little Orchestra Society of New York in a variety of venues, including the Hollywood Bowl and Lincoln Center. Narrators for his concerts have included James Earl Jones and Sigourney Weaver. He is currently heard on New York’s Classical Music Radio Station 105.9FM WQXR. He produced and hosted the WQXR Classical Comedy Contest from Carolines on Broadway, and he’s hosted a interviews with Mike Nichols, Wynton Marsalis, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Sting, Andrew Garfield, Tyne Daly, Sir Patrick Stewart and others in NY Public Radio’s Greene Space. He produced and directed a radio drama of A CHRISTMAS CAROL, in 2011 with F. Murray Abraham and in 2010 with David Hyde Pierce. He’s been a ‘voice’ for CNN and LIVE FROM LINCOLN CENTER on PBS. For more than 12 years he was on A&E hosting Breakfast with the Arts and Biography. He was featured on the Grammy Award winning comedy album WTWP Classical Talkity-Talk Radio with Peter Schickele. He’s currently working on a book about classical music with Alec Baldwin.
Jeff Lee
Jeff is the Staff Associate Director for Disney Theatrical Productions, having served as Associate to Julie Taymor on The Lion King and Bob Crowley on Tarzan. He also directed several domestic and international productions of each show on their behalf. Jeff is working in Creative Development on several new projects for Disney. Prior to joining them, Jeff had an active freelance career as the Associate Director on Cats, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and Shirley Valentine, directing several productions of each show both domestically and internationally. He has directed new works and established touring and regional productions, such as Love, Julie, Bleacher Bums, Getting To Know You, The Grapes of Wrath, Mountain Language, A Chorus Line, Song of Singapore, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Man of La Mancha, Oklahoma!, Sweet Charity, and Mortal Kombat. For several years, Jeff was Artistic Director of The North Carolina Theatre, and he continues to sit on the Advisory Board of The National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts in Washington, D.C. He also teaches as an Adjunct Professor in the Graduate Schools of the Yale School of Drama and the Columbia University School of Arts Theatre Division.
Scott Pask
Scott Pask is an award winning designer, who received a 2011 Tony® for his set design in Book of Mormon. Other Broadway credits include scenic and costume design for A Steady Rain with Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig and The Pillowman starring Billy Crudup and Jeff Goldblum (Tony Award for Scenic Design), and scenic design for The Coast of Utopia (Tony Award), Pal Joey (Tony nom.), Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Tony nom.), Hair, Promises, Promises, Nine, Speed-the-Plow, November, Cry-Baby, Take Me Out, Sweet Charity, Urinetown, The Wedding Singer, La Cage aux Folles, Little Shop of Horrors. Scott is also the scenic and prop designer for Cirque Du Soleil’s 2012 production Amaluna.
David Pomeranz
David is co-creator (with David Friedman and Kathie Lee Gifford) of Scandalous, a new musical about the life of controversial evangelist, Aimee Semple Macpherson. His solo recordings and chart-topping compositions have sold more than 40 millions copies worldwide. An Emmy nominee, his songs have been featured on “Boston Legal” and “Will & Grace,” as well as feature films (Big, King Kong). In musical theatre, David contributed songs for the West End hit Time, starring Cliff Richard and Laurence Olivier, and music and lyrics for the UK production of Little Tramp (which spawned an album on Warner Records starring Richard Harris, Mel Brooks, Petula Clark, Lea Salonga, and Treat Williams). His musical adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities recently opened at London’s Charing Cross Theatre, and he was the composer (again, along with Kathie Lee Gifford) of the 2005 off-Broadway production of Under the Bridge, starring Ed Dixon.
David Zippel
David’s lyrics have won him a Tony® Award, two Academy Award nominations, two Grammy nominations, and three Golden Globe nominations. He is one of few contemporary lyricists to have achieved success on Broadway, in Hollywood, and in the world of pop music. On Broadway, he won the Tony Award for City of Angels (with composer Cy Coleman), and was nominated for The Woman in White (with composer Andrew Lloyd Webber). Other Broadway credits include The Goodbye Girl, Liza’s at the Palace…, and Barbara Cook’s Broadway!. He worked with Alan Menken to write the songs for Disney’s Hercules, and Matthew Wilder to write songs for Disney’s Mulan. His music has been performed by a variety of popular artists including: Stevie Wonder, Mel Torme, Barbara Streisand, Ricky Martin, 98 Degrees, David Pomeranz, Cleo Laine, Linda Eder, Nancy La Mott, Sarah Brightman, Barbara Cook, Jeffery Osborne, Elaine Paige, and Liza Minnelli.
Note: Prior association with Lauren and Broadway Fantasy Camp does not imply or assure that any particular individual will be participating in your camp session.