Paulette Haupt

As co-founder and artistic director for The O'Neill's National Music Theater Conference since 1978, Paulette Haupt has selected and guided the development of more than one hundred new music theater works, including Desire Under the Elms, Nine, Captains Courageous, Avenue X, Violet, The Wild Party, The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Cameleon Skin, Radiant Baby, and Avenue Q.

An associate producer for Polly Pen’s first musical, Goblin Market, she has commissioned, developed and produced new works for OPERA America, The National Alliance for Musical Theater, Columbia Artists Management, and the Lake George Opera Festival.

In 2001, she and Edward Trach founded PREMIERES, established to commission, develop and promote new music theater works in New York City. The first season included works by Edward Dixon, Darrah Cloud, Kim Sherman, Noa Ain and Gerard Edery at the Clark Studio Theater at Lincoln Center. Subsequent works include three-time Richard Rodgers winner The Tutor, by Maryrose Wood and Andrew Gerle, and winners of the 2004 Richard Rodgers Development Awards Daniel Levin and Jonathan Portera for To Paint the Earth and Sam Carner and Derek Gregor for Unlock’d.

The first woman to conduct at the San Francisco Opera, for three decades she conducted a diverse repertoire of world premieres, musical theater and operas worldwide, including Alaska, China, Russia, India, New York, the Kennedy Center, and opera and music theater companies nationwide. In 2002, she was the associate conductor for the Grammy nominated recording of Joe Masteroff and Edward Thomas’ Desire Under the Elms, featuring the London Symphony Orchestra and Metropolitan opera stars James Morris, Victoria Livengood and Jerry Hadley.

As a pianist, she has appeared worldwide in concerts with major opera and musical theater singers, and is the only ’Plaidette’ ever to perform in Stuart Ross’ Forever Plaid in New York.