Susan Stroman

Susan Stroman, born October 17, 1954, in Wilmington, Delaware, is an American theatre director, choreographer, and performer. The daughter of Frances (née Nolan) and Charles Harry Stroman, she was introduced to show tunes through her father, a piano-playing salesman. She began studying dance at age five, focusing on jazz, tap, and ballet under James Jamieson at the Academy of the Dance in Wilmington. She later majored in English at the University of Delaware and, before relocating to New York City after graduating in 1976, gained experience directing, choreographing, and performing at community theaters in the Delaware and Philadelphia area.

Her professional career began in 1977 with an appearance in Hit the Deck at the Goodspeed Opera House. That same year she was cast as Hunyak in the National tour of Chicago, her first collaboration with composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb. Her Broadway career spanned 1977 to 1979 and included the musical Whoopee!, where she appeared as an ensemble member, and the play Chicago. In 1980 she served as assistant director, assistant choreographer, and dance captain for the Broadway production Musical Chairs. Choosing to focus on directing and choreographing rather than performing, Stroman built her craft through industrial shows, club acts, and commercials in smaller venues.

A significant turning point came in 1987 when Stroman choreographed an Off-Broadway revival of Flora the Red Menace, with music by Kander and Ebb, at the Vineyard Theatre. That work brought her to the attention of director Hal Prince, who engaged her to create dance sequences for his New York City Opera production of Don Giovanni. Her ongoing relationship with Kander and Ebb led to co-creating, alongside Scott Ellis and David Thompson, the 1991 Off-Broadway musical And the World Goes 'Round. The following year she choreographed Liza Stepping Out at Radio City Music Hall, earning an Emmy nomination, and then collaborated with director Mike Ockrent on the Broadway musical Crazy for You, which won the Tony Award for Best Musical and earned Stroman her first Tony Award for Best Choreography.

Stroman won her second Tony Award for Best Choreography in 1994 for a revival of Show Boat, on which she again collaborated with Prince. That same year she and Ockrent, who had become her husband, worked together on A Christmas Carol at Madison Square Garden, a holiday production that ran for ten years, and later on the 1996 Broadway musical Big, The Musical. A return collaboration with Kander, Ebb, Ellis, and Thompson produced the 1997 Broadway musical Steel Pier. In 1999, her choreography for an Oklahoma! production directed by Trevor Nunn at the Royal National Theatre earned her a second Laurence Olivier Award. That December, her husband Mike Ockrent died from leukemia.

Stroman channeled her focus into work, directing and choreographing the 2000 Broadway revival of The Music Man, her debut as a Broadway director. Simultaneously, she developed Contact with book writer John Weidman, a three-part dance play that opened at Lincoln Center's Mitzi Newhouse Theater in late 1999 before transferring to the Vivian Beaumont Theater, where it was reclassified as a musical. Contact won the 2000 Tony Award for Best Musical, and Stroman received her third Tony Award for Best Choreography. A live broadcast of the production on PBS's Live from Lincoln Center subsequently won a 2003 Emmy Award for Outstanding Classical Music-Dance Program.

In 2001, Stroman directed and choreographed The Producers, the Mel Brooks musical that had originally been slated for her late husband to direct. The production became a commercial and critical phenomenon, winning a record twelve Tony Awards. Stroman took home her fourth and fifth Tony Awards that evening — for Best Choreography and Best Direction of a Musical — becoming the first woman to win both awards in the same year. She was also only the second woman ever to win Best Direction of a Musical, after Julie Taymor in 1998. In 2005, Stroman made her feature film directorial debut with a film adaptation of The Producers, which received four Golden Globe Award nominations.

Subsequent stage work included directing and choreographing Thou Shalt Not (2001) with music by Harry Connick Jr. and The Frogs (2004) with a book by Nathan Lane, both for Lincoln Center Theater. In 2007 she reunited with Brooks to direct and choreograph Young Frankenstein, and in 2017 she and Brooks opened a revised version of the show at the Garrick Theatre in London's West End following a tryout at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle. The musical Happiness, with a book by John Weidman, music by Scott Frankel, and lyrics by Michael Korie, opened at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in February 2009.

The Scottsboro Boys, with music by Kander and Ebb and a book by David Thompson, opened at the Vineyard Theatre in February 2010, with Stroman directing and choreographing. The production transferred to Broadway, running for 49 performances at the Lyceum Theatre and receiving 12 Tony Award nominations. Regional productions followed at the Guthrie Theater, San Diego's Old Globe, American Conservatory Theater, and the Ahmanson Theatre. In 2013 Stroman directed the UK premiere at the Young Vic in London, and the subsequent West End transfer received the 2014 Evening Standard's Ned Sherrin Award. Also in 2010, she co-directed with Hal Prince the musical Paradise Found, which premiered at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London with a cast that included Mandy Patinkin, Judy Kaye, and Shuler Hensley.

Additional Broadway productions include Big Fish (2013), with songs by Andrew Lippa and a book by John August; Bullets Over Broadway the Musical (2014), developed with Woody Allen; and New York, New York. In 2014 she directed and choreographed a production of The Merry Widow for the Metropolitan Opera, starring Renée Fleming. She also directed POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive on Broadway.

Across her career, Stroman has accumulated five Tony Awards — four for Best Choreography and one for Best Direction of a Musical — along with two Laurence Olivier Awards, five Drama Desk Awards, eight Outer Critics Circle Awards, two Lucille Lortel Awards, and the George Abbott Award for Lifetime Achievement in the American Theater. In 2014 she was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in New York City.