42nd Street Moon - Artistic and Executive Staff

In 1993, attracted to a shared vision, Greg MacKellan and Stephanie Rhoads co-founded 42nd Street Moon to produce staged concerts of lost and forgotten musicals by beloved American composers like Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, and Irving Berlin. While these artists created many of the most popular songs and musicals of all time, MacKellan and Rhoads knew that the road to their stature as pillars of the American musical theatre included many other, lesser-known gems as well.

GREG MACKELLAN (Artistic Director, Writer, Director)
Greg MacKellan’s career in musical theatre extends back more than 30 years. His producing credits in New York and Los Angeles include The Baker’s Wife, a musical on which he worked extensively with Stephen Schwartz and Joseph Stein. A graduate of the Musical Theatre Program at UCLA, he is also a musical theatre historian of note who has worked as a consultant to performers like Andrea Marcovicci and Paige O’Hara. Greg was responsible for the acclaimed six-CD “Shadowland” series of recordings devoted to lesser-known songs by classic American musical theatre songwriters; performers he directed on these CDs include Judy Kaye, Rebecca Luker, Jason Graae, Patricia Morison, Susan Watson, Diana Canova and Sheldon Harnick. Greg was hired by the Yip Harburg Foundation in 1994 to provide a revised script for the forgotten Harburg/Styne musical Darling of the Day, and performed similar duties for 42ND Street Moon’s 2004 NEA-sponsored restoration of the Harburg/Arlen Hooray for What! Also in 2004, Greg’s award-winning revision of the Cole Porter musical Out of This World was presented to critical acclaimed at the Chichester Festival in England, and has since been produced in Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. During his 17 years as Artistic Director of 42ND Street Moon, Greg has directed more than 50 musicals, adapting the scripts for many of them. He has written and directed more than 15 revues for various Bay Area groups, including I’d Like to Hide It, which explored gay subtext in the lyrics of Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart. He has produced three CDs for Moon: original cast albums of Porter’s Something for the Boys and Leave It to Me!, and a Jerome Kern anthology, The First Rose of Summer. The 2004 TheatreMania Guide to Musical Theatre recordings lists Leave It To Me! as one of the top show CDs of 2002, and singles out the work of MacKellan and Dave Dobrusky on this CD for special acclaim. E-mail Greg MacKellan.

STEPHANIE RHOADS (Artistic Director)
Stephanie Rhoads plays roles on and off stage for 42nd Street Moon. Offstage she works with Greg MacKellan to shape each of Moon’s Seasons. Onstage, Stephanie most recently graced our stage as Madam La Comtesse Diane De Vobrillac in Ben Franklin in Paris. She also includes among her favorite Moon roles: Helen Vance in our smash production of Out of This World, Adriana in Boys From Syracuse, Ninotchka in Silk Stockings, Venus in One Touch of…, Elvira in High Spirits, Thea in Fiorello!, and Adeline in Sweet Adeline. She is the recipient of the Dean Goodman Choice Awards for Hello Dolly! with Mountain Play and Out of This World (2000) with 42nd Street Moon, as well as Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Awards. She has appeared with many regional companies including American Musical Theatre of San Jose, TheatreWorks, Broadway By the Bay, Beach Blanket Babylon, Woodminster Musicals, and more. E-mail Stephanie Rhoads.

LAUREN HEWITT (Managing Director)
Lauren Hewitt provides 42nd Street Moon's executive management. As the past Director of Development of the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley, she led a capital campaign to build the Aurora's new home theatre. While serving as, Executive Director of EARPLAY, she presented works by emerging Bay Area composers as well as established composers such as Andrew Imbrie and Lou Harrison. Hewitt frequently sits on funding panels for the Cultural Equity Grants Program of the San Francisco Arts Commission.

San Franciscans remember Hewitt as the owner and operator of the Clementina's Baybrick Inn, a favorite nightspot where she gave emerging artists the opportunity to break into performance and seasoned artists the challenge of presenting new work. Among the memorable Baybrick performers include Marga Gomez, Ellen DeGeneres, Paula Poundstone, Bonnie Hayes, and Linda Tillery. The Baybrick was awarded a San Francisco Cable Car Award for Hewitt's curatorship of local artists' work.

As the former Director of the Jon Sims Center for the Arts, she founded AIRspace, a new works residency program for performing artists. Under the fiscal sponsorship of the Jon Sims Center, she produced a new opera, Wuornos, on the main stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2001).

A fourth-generation Californian, Hewitt graduated from San Francisco State University with a Bachelors Degree in Directing Theatre, and she holds a Masters Degree in Arts Administration from Golden Gate University, San Francisco. E-mail Lauren Hewitt.

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