Jeffrey Hatcher is an award-winning writer for stage, screen, and television. Born in Steubenville, Ohio, he graduated from Denison in 1980 with a degree in Theater and Cinema, during the titanic era of Professor William Brasmer and Dr. R. Elliott Stout. After moving to New York and attending (briefly) New York University’s Graduate Acting Program, he shifted from performing to writing, encouraged by fellow Denison alumni Gram Slaton ’77. His first play, Impaired Faculties, was a comedy set in a small liberal arts college somewhere in the Midwest. Mercifully, according to Jeff, it has never been produced.
Since then, dozens of Hatcher’s plays, original and adaptations, have been produced on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and in theaters around the world. They include the book for the Broadway musical Never Gonna Dance, Dial M for Murder, Three Viewings, A Picasso, Scotland Road, The Turn of the Screw, Tuesdays with Morrie (with Mitch Albom), Ten Chimneys, Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Suicide Club, Compleat Female Stage Beauty, Mrs. Mannerly, Murderers, Ella, Mercy of a Storm, Smash, Armadale, Korczak’s Children, John Gabriel Borkman, Brand, An Enemy of the People, Pillars of Society, The Government Inspector, The Good Soldier, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. His most recent adaptations are of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Critic, which premiered at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington D.C., and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, which premiered at the Huntington Theatre in Boston, with Nick Offerman starring as “Ignatius J. Reilly.”
He has written screenplays for the films The Duchess with Kiera Knightley and Ralph Fiennes, Casanova with Heath Ledger and Sienna Miller, Stage Beauty with Billy Crudup and Claire Danes, and, most recently, Mr. Holmes, starring Ian McKellen. He has also written episodes of Columbo, The Mentalist, and the TV movie, Murder at the Cannes Film Festival.
Hatcher recently, after a 30 year hiatus, returned to the stage, acting in Educating Rita, The Heiress, and his own piece Jeffrey Hatcher’s Hamlet, a one-man show about adapting, directing and acting in his 5th grade school production of Shakespeare’s tragedy.
His awards and grants include: NEA, TCG, Lila Wallace Fund, 2013 IVEY Lifetime Achievement Award, Rosenthal New Play Prize, Frankel Award, Charles MacArthur Fellowship Award, Edgerton Grant, McKnight Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Barrymore Award Best New Play (A Picasso), and L.A. Critics Circle Award Best Adaptation (Cousin Bette). He is a member and/or alumnus of The Playwrights Center, the Dramatists Guild, the Writers Guild, and New Dramatists.
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Barry Kleinbort has worked as a director, composer, lyricist, and librettist, earning the prestigious Edward Kleban Foundation Award for Lyric Writing, two Gilman-Gonzalez Musical Theatre Commendations Award, the ASCAP/Jamie deRoy award for songwriting, the Second Stage Constance Klinsky musical theater award, two Back Stage Bistro awards, ten Manhattan Association of Cabarets (MAC) awards, and two Cable "Telly" awards for his efforts. He has also been a three-time finalist for the Fred Ebb Musical Foundation award. Mr. Kleinbort adapted and directed the New York premiere of Bob Merrill's musical THE PRINCE OF GRAND STREET starring Mike Burstyn for the Jewish Rep, and John Epperson’s well received autobiographical evening SHOW TRASH at the Studio Theater in Washington D.C. He wrote the book and lyrics for the musical WAS (based on Geoff Ryman’s cult classic with music by Joseph Thalken), which was the inaugural production of the American Music Theater Project in Chicago, and which has also been seen at the Human Race Theater in Dayton, Ohio. He wrote the incidental music and songs for the off-Broadway production of SECOND AVENUE by Allan Knee and the book, music and lyrics for ANGELINA, a musical based on "That Summer - That Fall" by Frank D. Gilroy. As librettist, he co-wrote with David Levy PERFECT HARMONY, a musical play about the lives of the Barry Sisters. His latest projects include providing the English songs (music and lyrics) for a bilingual musical revue called METROPOLITA(I)N (which has played successfully in both Paris and New York) and doing the book, music and lyrics for 13 THINGS ABOUT ED CARPOLOTTI, based on a play by Jeffrey Hatcher.
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