Jan Powell, composer, is an ASCAP member and winner of numerous ASCAP Special Awards. He is proud to have been a performing member of Actors Equity Association, and one of the first elected representatives to the Member Advisory Board of the Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop.

As a musical director in the professional theater, Jan has conducted more than 200 musical productions over the past thirty years. He has also conducted mainstage shows at the University of Southern California and UCLA, where he has served as an instructor in musical theater, audition technique, and vocal production during the Summer Institute program.

His work while a member of the Antaeus Company as musical director, composer, or arranger includes Trial by Jury and Patience (Antaeus workshop at the Mark Taper Forum), Legal Briefs, Mother Courage and Her Children, A Tale of Charles Dickens (for broadcast on NPR’s The Play’s the Thing), and A.A. Milne and John Achorn’s The Ugly Duckling.

Jan has served as a musical director for the historic Temple Theatre in Sanford, North Carolina. His work there includes the 2006 and 2007 Christmas shows, A Dash of Rosemary, Beehive — the ’60s Musical, Godspell, Ain’t Misbehavin’, Winter Wondrettes, Once On This Island, Dames at Sea, Little Women, South Pacific, and Beguiled Again: The Rodgers and Hart Songbook. He was also the music director and arranger for Regina Taylor’s musical play Crowns, directed by Rebecca Holderness, at Burning Coal Theatre in Raleigh, which traveled for an extended run at Temple Theatre.

In Asheville, North Carolina, Jan has served for three seasons as composer and pianist for Sandra Mason’s play Return of an Angel, produced by The Occasional Theatre at ACT during the Thomas Wolfe Festival. Other work with The Occasional Theatre includes the acclaimed Along About Sundown, a retrospective on the life of Bascom Lamar Lunsford, and The Ballad of Tom Dooley. Jan served as musical director for the inaugural production at The Altamont Theatre, Asheville’s newest Equity music theatre venue, playing the role of Del DaCosta in Pete ’n’ Keely.

Other work as musical director, conductor, or vocal arranger includes Rosenstrasse at Company Rep (world premiere), The Threepenny Opera at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, Inside Out directed by Kay Cole, William Hoffman’s Riga directed by Marshall Mason and produced by Drew Snyder and Venture West Theater, three seasons of A.S.K. Theater Projects’ Nautilus Workshop directed by Ben Krywosz, and The Virginia Avenue Project directed by Leigh Curran.

In television, Jan worked as musical director for ABC Family Channel’s State of Grace, and composed original music for the CBS show The District. His work with The Disney Company includes the feature film The Lizzie McGuire Movie.

In addition to his many works of musical theater written with Ken Stone, listed below, Jan wrote music for Tom Huey’s It Ain’t the Heat, It’s the Humility, published as one of the ten Best Short Plays of 1982, and words and music for The Ugly Duckling, published by the Dramatic Publishing Company. His musical Miss Vulcan 1939, written with Marian Partee and Noelle Donfeld, premiered at Red Mountain Theatre in Birmingham, Alabama, in 2007 and was brought back for a return engagement in 2008.

Ken Stone, bookwriter and lyricist, is a UCLA theater graduate, a long-time member of the Academy for New Musical Theatre, the Dramatists Guild, and ASCAP, and the winner of numerous ASCAP Special Awards.

In 2005 Ken won the prestigious Kleban Award for most promising librettist. This award, established by the late lyricist of A Chorus Line, seeks to encourage the growth and development of musical theater by awarding yearly grants to “promising lyricists and librettists working in the artistic form known as the American Musical Theatre.”

During a more than 35-year collaboration with composer Jan Powell, Ken has written shows that have been performed at La Mirada Civic Light Opera, Theatre Building Chicago, Los Angeles Theatre Center, the North Shore Music Theatre, TheaterWorks, the Powerhouse, the Victory Theatre, the Antaeus Company, and the National Alliance for Musical Theatre.

Powell & Stone’s works have been supported by the Frederick Loewe Trust, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Tuners Theatre, and the Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop.

Awards include a Jefferson Citation nomination for new work, an award from the Columbia Entertainment Company, the grand prize of the American Musical Theatre Festival, and an Ovation Award nomination.

In addition to his own works, Ken has contributed lyrics and lyric translations to Legal Briefs, Rosie’s, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Threepenny Opera, The New Normal, A Sensible Girl, and A.A. Milne and John Achorn’s The Ugly Duckling.