Michael Mayer is an American theatre director, filmmaker, and playwright who won the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical in 2007 for directing Spring Awakening, which also won the award for Best Musical. He was nominated for the 2002 Tony for his direction of Thoroughly Modern Millie, which he then directed on London's West End. Mayer also won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Director of a Musical for both Spring Awakening and Thoroughly Modern Millie. Other Broadway credits include The Lion in Winter, the 1999 revival of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Side Man, the book for the musical American Idiot. He directed the first Broadway production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which opened in 2014. His off-Broadway directing credits include Stupid Kids, Baby Anger, View of the Dome, and the New York premiere of Antigone in New York.

Michael has put a few more Tony-Award winning shows on his resume, including Spring Awakening, and we talked about all the show(s) he has captained, as well as:

The GOOD review that made him stop reading reviews altogether.

Why he convinced everyone to wait for Neil Patrick Harris to be available for Hedwig and how we got that performance out of him.

How he can still feel like a fraud, even with a Tony Award on his shelf, and how he gets through that when he starts a new show.

Plays versus musicals and the skills you need for both.

The day he knew to hang it up as a performer because there were bigger things that he could do.


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