Jeanine Tesori

Jeanine Tesori, born Jeanine Levenson on November 10, 1961, in Port Washington, New York, is an American composer and musical arranger whose work in the theater has earned her six Tony Award nominations, five Grammy Award nominations for Best Musical Theater Album, and two Tony Awards for Best Original Score. She attended Paul D. Schreiber High School in Port Washington before enrolling at Barnard College of Columbia University, where she began as a pre-med student before switching her major to music. Her introduction to live theater came at age fourteen, when she attended a production of Godspell at the Promenade.

Tesori entered the professional theater world as the substitute assistant conductor on the 1989 production of Gypsy. Her credited Broadway debut came in 1991, when she served as dance arranger, associate conductor, and keyboard player for The Secret Garden. She subsequently worked as associate conductor and keyboardist on the original production of The Who's Tommy alongside frequent collaborator Des McAnuff, later music directing the German production of that show. She arranged dance music for the 1995 revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and contributed arrangements to the musical revue Dream, as well as incidental music and dance arrangements for the 1998 production of The Sound of Music.

In 1997, Tesori composed the score for the Off-Broadway musical Violet, which earned her an Obie Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical, and the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Musical. The show later transferred to Broadway and stands among her major stage credits. The following year, after being introduced to director Nicholas Hytner by Ira Weitzman, Tesori wrote sixty minutes of music for Hytner's 1998 Lincoln Center production of Twelfth Night, completing the score in three months. That work earned her the 1999 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music in a Play and a Tony Award nomination, notable given that scores for plays are not typically considered in that category.

In 2000, Tesori partnered with lyricist Dick Scanlan to write eleven new songs for a stage adaptation of Thoroughly Modern Millie. Following a successful run at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, the production transferred to Broadway in 2002, earning Tesori nominations for both the Tony Award for Best Original Score and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music. Her next major Broadway work, Caroline, or Change, a sung-through musical created with Tony Kushner, opened in 2004 and brought her a third Tony nomination for Best Original Score as well as the 2004 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music. Tesori and Kushner have collaborated four times in total, including incidental music for his 2006 translation of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, produced as part of Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte Theater, and the opera A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck, which premiered at Glimmerglass in the summer of 2011. In 2019, Tesori also served as voice coach on Steven Spielberg's film adaptation of West Side Story, for which Kushner wrote the screenplay.

Tesori wrote the music for Shrek the Musical, which opened on Broadway in 2008 and generated both Tony and Drama Desk Award nominations. In 2011, she began work on Fun Home, composing the music to a book and lyrics by Lisa Kron, based on the memoir by Alison Bechdel. The show was developed at the Sundance Institute's 2011 Theatre Lab and the 2009 Ojai Playwrights Conference before opening Off-Broadway at The Public Theater on October 17, 2013, where it won the 2014 Obie Award for Musical Theatre. It transferred to Broadway at Circle in the Square Theatre, with previews beginning March 27, 2015, and an official opening on April 19, 2015. Tesori and Kron won the Tony Award for Best Original Score, becoming the first all-female composing team to win that award. Fun Home was also named a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama finalist.

Tesori served as artistic director of the Off-Broadway concert series Encores! Off-Center, whose July 2013 season included productions of The Cradle Will Rock, I'm Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road, and Violet. In that role she also recruited Jake Gyllenhaal to play Seymour in the 2015 Encores! production of Little Shop of Horrors. Her opera The Lion, The Unicorn, and Me, with a libretto by J. D. McClatchy based on a children's book by Jeanette Winterson and directed by Francesca Zambello, premiered with the Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center in December 2013. In July 2019, her opera Blue, with a libretto by Tazewell Thompson addressing police brutality against African American boys, premiered at the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, New York.

With book and lyrics by David Henry Hwang, Tesori's musical Soft Power began performances at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles in May 2018 and at San Francisco's Curran Theatre in June of that year before opening Off-Broadway at the Public Theater on September 14, 2019. The musical was named a 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama finalist. Kimberly Akimbo, with book and lyrics by David Lindsay-Abaire, opened at the Linda Gross Theater in Manhattan in December 2021, winning Best Musical at the Drama Desk Awards, Lucille Lortel Awards, and Outer Critics Circle Awards. The production transferred to Broadway in fall 2022, with previews beginning October 12 and an official opening on November 10. Tesori and Lindsay-Abaire won the 2023 Tony Award for Best Original Score, making Tesori the first female composer to win that award twice, and the show itself won Best Musical.

Beyond the stage, Tesori has composed music for several films, including The Emperor's New Groove 2: Kronk's New Groove, Mulan II, Shrek the Third, The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Beginning, The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, and Nights in Rodanthe. She also wrote the English versions of three songs for the 2016 Tokyo DisneySea stage show Out of Shadowland, which were performed in Japanese by pop singer Angela Aki.