If you’ve had a chance to watch the 2023 film ‘Theater Camp’ starring Ben Platt, Ayo Adebiri, and Molly Gordon, you’ll be familiar with the idea that all are welcome the music theater space. While that may definitely be true for the musical theater camp scene, where kids and students who feel like they are on the margins of their mainstream social circles find their fit, the working musical theater industry is a very different song and dance altogether.
Looking at the gender breakdown from the 2017–18 Broadway season, a Broadway By The Numbers study found a mere 17% of talent behind the scenes were women. This includes directors, writers and choreographers. The number of women with lead or speaking roles also dipped to 32%, down from 37% the previous season. As the study also outlines, the majority of Broadway ticket buyers are women, which begs the question – who are these shows made for if women are not the majority of creators, or even equally represented?
To answer this question and more, we had the opportunity to speak with a trailblazer who has made it her personal and professional mission to change the status quo in the musical theater industry, so that all those kids who do attend theater camps in their younger years, can eventually and confidently pursue musical theater as a viable career choice in the future knowing it is a space welcoming of all artists.
Georgia Stitt is the mastermind, or better yet the Maestra, behind Maestra Music – a non-profit that provides support, visibility, and community to the women and nonbinary people who make the music in the musical theater industry. As a composer/lyricist and Music Director herself, Georgia has seen first hand the disparities that exist across the industry, and founded the organization in 2017. Georgia worked as the Music Director of the Off-Broadway revival of ‘Sweet Charity’ (directed by Leigh Silverman, orchestrated by Mary-Mitchell Campbell, starring Sutton Foster), and the difficulty that team had finding and hiring an all-female band illuminated a problem: women musicians seemed to be invisible.
The group chose the name “Maestra” as the feminine counterpart to the traditional “Maestro,” which refers to an eminent composer, conductor, or teacher of music. Georgia hired a web designer to turn her crowd-sourced spreadsheet of women composers and pit musicians into an online directory, and musicians began to sign themselves up. Maestra was filling a great need in the theater community, linking together musical women and shining a spotlight in their direction to empower them collectively and individually.
For the past 4 years, Maestra have been holding an annual fundraiser show called Amplify, produced by Georgia along with Tony Award nominee and Maestra Advisory Board Member Kate Baldwin, Carrie Caffrey, Laura Ivey, and Whitney Britt. The concert represents a unique opportunity to witness the diversity and talent of Maestras in musical theater, highlighting their crucial role in shaping the industry.
As Georgia explains, audiences who buy a ticket for Amplify come for the amazing performances but leave empowered to take Maestra’s work back into their own communities. It is a celebration of the diversity of the musical theater world that starts at the end of Women’s History Month and continues throughout the year.
As the fourth annual event just wrapped up in NYC, we spoke with Georgia about her own career trajectory, why the gender disparity still exists, and how she hopes the organization will eventually become obsolete due to Maestra’s ongoing work.
Where did your music career begin, and what have been some of your career highlights so far?
I started piano lessons when I was seven years old and learned how to play several other instruments in school. By the time I graduated from college with a degree in music composition, I had played in all kinds of ensembles and really found “my people” in the theater. I was never going to be an actor, but I loved being part of that kind of musical storytelling.
I’d say some professional highlights include performing my own music with the New York Pops at Carnegie Hall, conducting an orchestra for Stephen Sondheim and getting a personal thank you note from him afterwards, music directing ’13: The Musical’ for Netflix during the height of the pandemic with all of those incredibly difficult masking regulations for singers, and playing the piano for the tour of the original Broadway show ‘Parade’ in 2000 and then also for the Broadway revival in 2023.
Where did the idea for Maestra Music come from, and why did you feel it was necessary to launch it?
On New Year’s Eve 2016, I premiered an original choral piece at The Cathedral of St. John The Divine in New York City. After the concert, I was greeted by a young female composer who told me she was overwhelmed to see a living female composer programmed on such a large concert, and she realized she couldn’t think of any other female composer modeling the career she was trying to build.
A few days later, I got an email from another young female composer who told me that her graduate school musical theater curriculum didn’t include any female writers. When she confronted the administration about the omission, they asked her to suggest which composers she would like added to the syllabus. She didn’t know who to recommend, and honestly, that’s why she was in grad school – to learn what she didn’t know.
I got those two women together for lunch and we talked about this strange business of being a female theater composer. Around the same time, I was music directing an off-Broadway production of ‘Sweet Charity’ and had my own trouble finding female musicians. Once I found and hired them, most of the women told me they’d had such a hard time breaking into the business. More than anything, I came to realize that these women felt lonely, without access to their own community and without the visibility and support that allows a musician to step forward in her career.
Everything about Maestra has grown from there. We now have an online directory of over 2200 women and nonbinary musicians, a mentorship program, Regional and Affinity Groups all over the world, online workshops, DEIA training and resources for our members and their communities, and the programming goes on and on.
What are some of the barriers women and minorities often come up against in the music theater world, and how is Maestra Music working to change that?
There are measurable things and then there are anecdotal things. There is a moment when a young person chooses an instrument, and we know that girls are often discouraged from picking the louder, more aggressive instruments. In a recent study (covering the Broadway seasons from 2011 to 2019), we learned that 80% of working Broadway cellists and 91% of Broadway harpists are female, but for those same years on Broadway women were only 2% of the drummers, 3% of the percussionists, 4% of the guitarists, 8% of the trombonists, and 2% of the trumpeters. It’s surprising, right?
Instruments aren’t gendered, but we do seem to perceive them in a gendered way. I know a professional flutist who told me that when she was in middle school, she told her band director that she wanted to play the drums, and he said, “Oh, no. Drums are for boys. Maybe you want to play the flute?” So she did – and she loves the flute – but she has always wondered if she would have been a good drummer, and she resents that he got to make that decision for her.
I was at a concert at Carnegie Hall recently and the gender divide was clear: on stage right (strings and harp) most of the players were women. And on stage left (brass, woodwinds, percussion) every player was a man.
Maestra’s active efforts in this area include building up our Student Maestras Affinity Group and linking younger musicians with more established artists through our Mentorship Program. And honestly, I think our social media presence is part of how we deliver on our mission, because we’re giving visibility to the women and nonbinary people in our community so they can see each other working, thriving, achieving.
Can you tell us more about the annual Amplify event and what its mission is?
Amplify is our annual fundraising concert, and our mission is to raise the money to support our programs and infrastructure while celebrating the talents of our members. We have an all Maestra band led by the wonderful Julianne B. Merrill (who is also the moderator of our Maestra Pride Affinity Group) and we perform ten songs – all written by Maestras – celebrating the representation of women and nonbinary people creating on Broadway in the upcoming season, winning this year’s awards, or just in general being musical theater bad-asses. It’s a great community event and the positive energy in the room is both fun and powerful.
Why is it important that we see more female and non-binary folks in positions of leadership and center stage in musical theater?
When Jeanine Tesori won her Best Original Score Tony Award in 2015 for ‘Fun Home’ (written with Lisa Kron), she said in her acceptance speech that “for girls, you have to see it to be it.” That representation is so significant. We are empowered when we see people like us doing the thing we want to do because it makes it easier to visualize ourselves doing it. I know of a young woman who didn’t want to major in music composition at college because the faculty in that department was all male and so were all the other majors. She told me that she knew she was interested in being a composer, not a trailblazer. What a missed opportunity – both for the student and for the school!
Looking to the corporate world for more data, I found a 2018 study from McKinsey & Co. which analyzed more than 1,000 companies worldwide and proved that gender and ethnic diversity are clearly correlated with profitability. Organizations with greater diversity among their executive teams have higher profits and longer-term value. This report identified a global relevance of the link between diversity—defined as a greater proportion of women and a more mixed ethnic and cultural composition in the leadership of large companies—and company financial outperformance. What’s more, companies with low rates of both gender and racial diversity are 29% more likely to make less money. In other words, it’s harmful to a company’s bottom line if its teams don’t have diversity.
Whether you’re looking from the point of view of the artists stepping into a creative workspace or from the point of view of the company looking to benefit from those artists’ creations, it’s clear that having women and nonbinary folks in spaces that have previously been held only by men is not just advantageous, it’s crucial.
Behind the scenes of the musical theater world, tell us something that readers may not be aware of or understand, that underscores why you do the work do you.
I’m not sure people who aren’t at the center of our business know how small the industry is. We really do mostly know each other, and because our work takes us from contract to contract, with shows opening and closing and moving through the early stages of development with short-term readings and workshops, we tend to form quick and intense friendships that ebb and flow every few months.
Because our social networks are so large, there is a family feeling to the theater community. I certainly feel this in the New York theater scene, but I have also felt it in other communities where I’ve visited, lived, or worked. Theater can be a very cut-throat industry, but theater people tend to have each other’s backs. I never wanted to move through this industry alone, and in my twenties especially I really leaned on the friendship, emotional support, and advice I got from the few other women I knew who did what I did for a living.
I think I do this work because I can’t imagine how I would have sustained a career in this transient, ephemeral, wild business without them, and I wanted to make sure others felt the power of that network, too.
We have often heard colloquial discussions of the way theater camp or musical theater in general can be a welcoming place for youth who feel like they don’t fit in in other areas of life and school. With this in mind, how can musical theater have a wider impact on society when it is more inclusive behind the scenes?
One of theater’s greatest strengths is that it is a medium that requires empathy. Actors have to find empathy in order to relate to the characters they portray. Musicians use their music to connect emotionally to the undercurrent of the story that’s being told on stage, and audiences allow those musical stories to pierce them so they can feel something more deeply than they’re allowed to feel in their everyday lives.
When theater creates a space for empathy, audiences can be transported into situations that are beyond their own lived experiences and their hearts can crack open. If we are telling our stories successfully, then the theater is a place where everyone can feel a transformative sense of belonging – performers, writers, musicians, and even audience members. Especially audience members.
Who are some of the performers in this year’s Amplify event that you are excited for audiences to see?
This question is like asking me who my favorite child is! I love all of them! I will say that part of what I love most about this event is that we’ve got some starry performers who will draw you in because of the familiarity of their names, but we’ve also got people we know are future stars of shows you haven’t yet seen, and it’s exciting to think that you might discover them first at Amplify. (A complete list of the performers is here.)
As an industry changemaker and leader, where do you hope the industry will be in 10 years, and what major shifts do you hope will happen?
We’ve been talking at Maestra lately about how the goal of a nonprofit really should be to put yourself out of business. Our mission statement says that we provide support, visibility, and community to the women and nonbinary people who make the music in the musical theater industry. How amazing would it be if the industry changes so much that we all feel equity in our workspaces and the programs of Maestra are no longer needed?
I don’t anticipate we’ll be there in ten years, but that’s the endgame. In the meantime, we’re working on growing the Maestra Directory, building up our Regional and Affinity Groups, strengthening Student Maestras and establishing chapters in colleges where there are strong programs in musical theater.
But I’ll tell you, I’m feeling it already. Maestra started in 2016 and was incorporated as a nonprofit in 2019. From 2010 to 2020, 75% of Broadway orchestras were entirely male, but in the 2022-2023 season, that number dropped to zero. Not a single Broadway orchestra last year didn’t have at least one woman or nonbinary person in it. It’s not gender parity yet, but it sure does feel like progress.
As the Maestra Music website outlines: In the summer of 2021 the musicians union in NYC surveyed their membership and learned that only 29% of its total membership is female. Within that, the number of female-identifying musicians who work specifically on Broadway is 22%. Additional statistics from our industry include the fact that three out of four Broadway orchestras are entirely male. Only 8% of new Broadway scores in the last ten years were composed by women, and only 4% of the orchestrator jobs on Broadway were held by women. In the last eight years, out of 98 available Broadway drum chairs, only two went to women. There is still much work to do.
To join the Mastra Music mission as they commit to doing this crucial work, visit the website, see more of Amplify 2024 event HERE, and follow the organization on Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube.
