Tazewell Thompson

Tazewell Thompson is an American actor, theatre director, opera director, and playwright born in New York City. He appeared on Broadway in the original productions of The National Health in 1974 and Checking Out in 1976, and also performed in numerous Off-Off-Broadway plays by Rosalyn Drexler. He currently serves as Director of Opera Studies at Manhattan School of Music.

Thompson's childhood was marked by hardship. His father was a jazz musician who traveled frequently, and his mother developed emotional difficulties following a fire in the family's apartment in which his three-year-old brother died. At the age of eight, his paternal grandmother arranged for him to be placed in a home run by the Sisters of St. Dominic in Blauvelt, New York, where he lived for six years and received the initiatory sacraments of the Catholic Church. The sisters encouraged his interest in theatre, an experience he later drew upon when directing Francis Poulenc's opera Dialogues of the Carmelites.

Early in his career, Thompson taught at St. Ann's School in New York, where he directed productions including Stephen Sondheim's Follies and Phèdre in French. His direction of a revival of Aaron Copland's opera The Second Hurricane at the Henry Street Settlement brought him wider attention. Zelda Fichandler, co-founder of Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., subsequently invited him to join the company as an assistant director. During his time in Washington, Thompson worked with playwright Cheryl West on early productions including Before It Hits Home.

In 1992, Thompson was appointed artistic director of Syracuse Stage in New York state, a position he held through 1995, making him one of a small number of Black directors to lead a regional theatre at that time. His counterparts in that distinction included Kenny Leon at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, George C. Wolfe at the New York Shakespeare Festival, and Lloyd Richards at the Yale Repertory Theater. Thompson made the theatre's repertory more inclusive from the outset of his tenure, and his first season included Jar the Floor by Cheryl L. West, which became one of the company's most popular productions. In June 2005, he was selected as artistic director of the Westport Country Playhouse in Westport, Connecticut, serving through the 2007 season.

Thompson's opera directing career began in 2000 when he directed Porgy and Bess for the New York City Opera. He directed the same work again in Washington, D.C., in May 2006, and that production was nominated for an Emmy Award for Best Director when it was televised. He also received an NAACP Theatre Award for Director of a Musical for the production in 2006. His work with Glimmerglass Opera has been extensive: he directed Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites there in 2002, followed by Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience in the summer of 2004, Benjamin Britten's Death in Venice in the summer of 2005, and Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill's Lost in the Stars in August 2012, a musical based on Alan Paton's 1948 novel Cry, the Beloved Country. The City Opera presented his production of Dialogues of the Carmelites in 2004. In July 2019, Thompson directed Jeanine Tesori's opera Blue at Glimmerglass, for which he also wrote the libretto; the work addresses the issue of police brutality against African-American teenage boys.

As a playwright, Thompson wrote Constant Star in 2002, a musical drama about the life of nineteenth-century activist and journalist Ida B. Wells. First produced at City Theatre in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the play uses five actresses to portray Wells and other figures in her life, and incorporates approximately twenty Negro spirituals as dramatic transitions. The work has toured across the United States. His play Mary T. & Lizzy K., centered on Mary Todd Lincoln and Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave who worked as a modiste and friend of Lincoln, premiered at the Mead Center for American Theater at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., in March 2013. Thompson also wrote and directed Jubilee, an a cappella musical based on the Fisk Jubilee Singers of Fisk University, which had its premiere at Arena Stage in 2019.