Joshua Wolf Coleman (Danforth)  Central Square Theater: Cloud 9; Joshua has worked with luminaries of the stage including Edward Albee, Joseph Chaiken and Anne Bogart at The Guthrie Theater, Actors’ Theatre of Louisville, Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the La Jolla Playhouse. Other roles include: Norry the Drag Queen, the Headless Sheep, Puddn’head Wilson, and Macbeth, Lysander, Friar Lawrence, Angleo, and Iago. He is currently playing President Obama in web series, Obama Monologues. Television work includes, Bosch, How to Get Away With Murder, The West Wing, Scandal, House, Huff, Grays Anatomy and Touchstone’s Hidalgo.

August 2019.

Murray Horwitz became the host and co-producer (with Jill Ahrold Bailey) of WAMU’s The Big Broadcast in June of 2016. Murray is a Tony Award-winning playwright, lyricist, and director, whose accomplishments include originating the hit NPR comedy quiz, Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me, co-authoring the hit Broadway musical Ain’t Misbehavin’, and writing the song lyrics for John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby at The Metropolitan Opera. He has been called, “My first mentor” by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda.

In 2016, Murray collaborated on a new musical, Born For This: The BeBe Winans Story, at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta and Arena Stage in Washington. He is Director of Special Projects for Washington Performing Arts, for whom, in 2014, he wrote and directed Of Thee We Sing: The Marian Anderson 75^th Anniversary Celebration. His other playwriting credits include Hard Sell at the Public Theater in New York; RFK – The Journey to Justice for L.A. Theatreworks; Freedom Rider, at the University of Missouri/Kansas City: and a musical for young audiences, The Magic Tree House: A Night In New Orleans with Allen Toussaint and Will Osborne. He is an occasional commentator for NPR News, and appears with Susan Stamberg in NPR’s annual special, Hanukkah Lights.

The winner of three Peabody Awards, a Tony for Ain’t Misbehavin’, two National Medals of Arts (for NPR Cultural Programming and Washington Performing Arts), and the Order of Arts and Letters from the government of France, Mr. Horwitz began his career as a clown in the Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey Circus.

Richard Maltby, Jr. (b. Ripon, WI, 6 October 1937) is a lyricist, director, book and screenplay writer, producer, creative consultant, and all-round theatrical idea-man. He is also a formidable award-winner: he conceived and directed the only two musical revues ever to win the Tony Award® for Best Musical: Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1978) and Fosse (1999).

Maltby’s father, Richard Eldridge Maltby, Sr., was a well-known music arranger (Benny Goodman’s “Six Flats Unfurnished”) who moved from Chicago to New York in 1945 – when young Richard was seven – to work with Paul Whiteman, etc. The elder Maltby arranged and conducted for the likes of Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan, Johnnie Ray, Vic Damone and Ethel Merman, achieved fame on his own in 1954 with such recordings as “The St. Louis Blues Mambo” and “The Man with the Golden Arm,” recorded multiple albums for Columbia and RCA, and for the next twenty years had a traveling dance band. Thus his son, growing up, was no stranger to show business.

As an undergraduate at Yale, Richard Maltby, Jr. collaborated with composer David Shire on two musicals. Their partnership continued after college, resulting in full scores for at least half a dozen shows – The Sap of Life was produced off-Broadway in 1961, and in the next decade, five of their songs were recorded by Barbra Streisand, including “Autumn,” the first song they wrote together for a show at Yale; and “Starting Here, Starting Now” featured prominently in Sreisand’s 1966 television special and companion album Color Me Barbra. In 1970 Shire departed for California to write music for films, and Maltby chose to stay on the east coast to pursue a career in the theatre as a writer/director.

Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American playwright, essayist, and a controversial figure in the twentieth-century American theater. Among his most popular plays are All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953) and A View From the Bridge (1955, revised 1956). He wrote several screenplays and was most noted for his work on The Misfits (1961). The drama Death of a Salesman has been numbered on the short list of finest American plays in the 20th century.

Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s. During this time, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In 1980, Miller received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. He received the Prince of Asturias Award, the Praemium Imperiale prize in 2002 and the Jerusalem Prize in 2003, as well as the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Lifetime Achievement Award.