Cabrillo Stage, the beloved professional summer musical theatre festival, has a new artistic director, Andrea L. Hart, who hails from Berkeley and produced the Fringe Festival at the Great Plains Theatre Conference.
Hart, 46, will be only the fourth Cabrillo Stage artistic director, and the first woman to lead the company, founded in 1981 by Lile O. Cruse.
Andrea L. Hart
She was hired to succeed Jon Nordgren, artistic director for 17 years, who retired in September.
Cabrillo Dean of Visual, Applied, and Performing Arts John Graulty said, “Our national search for a new artistic director for Cabrillo Stage landed us a bright, young, articulate star in the theater firmament.”
Hart is an accomplished playwright and theatre maker, having had her work developed at the Great Plains Theatre Conference, CounterPulse, MacDowell, New Ohio Theatre, Hyde Park Theatre, and the University of Texas New Theatre Festival of New Work.
She came to Santa Cruz in July after finishing a master’s in fine arts in directing at the University of Texas at Austin.
Before graduate school, she lived in the Berkeley area for 20 years, where she was a co-founder and member of several small theatre companies, including 6NewPlays, which focused on producing new plays by Bay Area playwrights. She also taught visual and performing arts and directed musicals and plays in schools all over the Bay Area.
“Studying how to make live theatre during a pandemic was not what I set out in graduate school to do,” said Hart. “However, I feel incredibly fortunate to have been in school during that time. It served as a crucible to not only my artistic practice, but my thinking on how to keep live performance relevant to our communities as we move forward.”
In a letter to the Cabrillo Stage mailing list, Hart wrote: “Whether it’s an unforgettable performance from years ago, a tune that never leaves your head, or the lyrics that remind you you’re not alone, musical theatre has the power to connect and uplift us like nothing else.”
Hart is invested in community building and supporting a healthy local artist ecosystem.
When she was director of education and public programs at the Oceanside Museum of Art, she began the first dance residency with local dancer Alyssa Junious, who created new work and community events in response to the artwork in the galleries.
“Theatre, by its very nature, is a local endeavor,” Hart said. “It exists in a particular place and time and it speaks to those who see it in that moment. I want Cabrillo Stage to represent the Monterey Bay community in all of its fullness and to be a place our audiences call home.”
Hart answered these questions for Aptos Times:
As a playwright, you wrote “Murky as Hell.” What’s it about?
Murky as Hell” is based around stories of women who aided Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, and Terry Richardson, amongst others.
What began as an exercise in imagining fitting punishment for these women, turned into a meditation on the unnerving grey areas around the violence women inflict on each other and the systems that teach us how to do it.
The show included a Mad Max-style wasteland, a sci-fi reprogramming center and an over-the-top Wrestlemania-inspired Thunderdome fight sequence.
Your favorite musical?
As a child, we had the record to “Annie.” My mom sat by the record player and transcribed all the lyrics using a typewriter and we used that script to sing those songs incessantly.
I can’t say that’s my “favorite” musical, but it is inscribed on my psyche in a very deep way. I also learned “The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow” in sign language.
Why Cabrillo Stage?
Any time a mention of Cabrillo comes up in conversation, it is always with the most loving and reverent tones. Anyone I know who has studied there always raves about it. I also had looked into the theatre when I arrived in town and heard what quality productions they put on.
During the application and interview process, I was encouraged by the questions that were asked and the thinking that was going into season selection and culture around the theatre.
As I’ve gotten started, I’m repeatedly touched by how many people hold this place dear.
It feels like an institution that is very much rooted in and serving its local community. I find that very inspiring and energizing.
How will you decide which shows to stage?
Season selection is always a process of trying to thread the needle on many different needs and desires. I believe in a collaborative process that involves as many stakeholders in the conversation as possible.
We reached out to the community with a survey that presented genres to gauge audience interest, we’ve reached out to the artistic community to see what is exciting to collaborators, we look at what is being produced in surrounding communities to gauge what niche hasn’t been filled, and then a group of us gets in a room and has a spirited discussion.
In the end, you want to get to a place where the community can trust that even if they don’t know the show or feel they don’t like the show, they are excited to see what Cabrillo Stage will do and that will keep them coming back.
Where do you live? What’s your impression of the Santa Cruz County housing market — for homebuyers & renters?
I live in the Westside of Santa Cruz. We moved here because my partner, Ross, got an exciting job at the Elkhorn Slough Foundation. His entire family lives here, though, so it’s a place we’ve often come back to in our years away.
Let’s just say we moved here in July and we didn’t move into our rental until October. We were lucky enough to have wonderful family to stay with until we could find a rental we could afford. (Buying was never an option.)
When I left Berkeley (after 20 years and an incredibly sweet rental deal) I never thought I’d come back to the Bay Area because as a theatre artist I’d never be able to afford it.
There were some desperate feeling moments between July and September, but in the end we got very lucky with a sweet landlord. And an opportunity to get rid of a lot of stuff! In all seriousness, I love our neighborhood and feel incredibly lucky to walk my dog to the beach on any given day.
I do think the cost of living directly impacts the type of arts that a community can sustain. So many of us consider our work a labor of love, but I know I’ve tried to make love pay the rent many times and it never works out.
I feel very fortunate that we stumbled on the place we got and I hope that as the conversation continues in this area, solutions to the lack of affordable housing will continue to move forward.