Meet the Parent hosted by Anika Larsen
This season’s guests include Joanna Gleason, Chris Sarandon, Andréa Burns, Peter Flynn, Audra McDonald, Ann Harada, Cameron Crowe, and Tom Kitt.
NYCCT’s Meet the Parent hosted by Anika Larsen is specifically designed to provide opportunities for our adult audience members to connect with us and each other around issues important to them as parents, grandparents, caretakers, and fans of theater.
About Anika
Anika Larsen has performed on Broadway in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, Avenue Q, Xanadu, All Shook Upand Rent. Off-Broadway, she was in Zanna, Don’t!, Myths and Hymns, Closer Than Ever, Miracle Brothers, How to Save the World and Find True Love in 90 Minutes, Disaster! and Unbroken Circle. Anika wrote and performed in a musical called Shafrika, The White Girlabout her childhood growing up in Cambridge, MA with nine brothers and sisters from different races and countries. She released an album of lullabies for all ages called Sing You to Sleep. Anika majored in theater at Yale University and is a proud member of Actors’ Equity Association and SAG-AFTRA. Anika looks forward to returning to Broadway in 2022 in Almost Famous the Musical.
“We theater artists are used to doing interviews about our work, but once we become parents, there’s this whole other side of our lives that is just as consuming and meaningful to us, and people rarely ask about it in depth. I’m so excited to have conversations with these amazing guests about the joyful and exasperating truths of being artist parents!”
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Meet Our Guests for the Season
Cameron Bruce Crowe is an American director, producer, screenwriter, journalist, author, and actor. Before moving into the film industry, Crowe was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine, for which he still frequently writes.
Thomas Robert Kitt is an American composer, conductor, orchestrator, and musician. For his score for the musical Next to Normal, he shared the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama with Brian Yorkey.
Audra McDonald is unparalleled in the breadth and versatility of her artistry as both a singer and an actor. The winner of a record-breaking six Tony Awards, two Grammy Awards and an Emmy Award, in 2015 she was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people and received a National Medal of Arts—America’s highest honor for achievement in the field—from President Barack Obama. Blessed with a luminous soprano and an incomparable gift for dramatic truth-telling, she is as much at home on Broadway and the opera stage as in her film and television roles. Alongside her theatrical work, she maintains a major career as a concert and recording artist, regularly appearing at the world’s foremost venues.
Ann Harada originated the role of Christmas Eve and appeared in The Vineyard, Broadway, and London productions of AVENUE Q and spent two years as stepsister Charlotte in RODGERS + HAMMERSTEIN’S CINDERELLA. Other Broadway: 9 TO 5, LES MISERABLES (revival), SEUSSICAL, M. BUTTERFLY. Her solo concert was featured in Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series in 2014. Film: The Nest (alt. title: Sisters), Admission, Hope Springs, The Art of Getting By, Feel, Happiness. TV includes: SMASH (recurring as Linda, the Stage Manager), THE BIG C, LIPSTICK JUNGLE, and 30 ROCK.
Joanna Gleason has appeared in fifteen Broadway and Off-Broadway, and Off-off-Broadway shows.
She won a Tony for Best Actress in a Musical in Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Into The Woods”. She has three Drama Desks and two Outer Critics nominations and wins.
There were Tony nominations for “Dirty, Rotten Scoundrels” and Joe Egg” on Broadway.
Off-Broadway includes shows for The Public Theatre (The Normal Heart), The Roundabout (Sons Of The Prophet), and Manhattan Theatre Club. (It’s Only A Play. Eleemosynary)
Film work includes Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, Hannah and Her Sisters; Boogie Nights, Last Vegas, The Skeleton Twins.
Television includes The Affair, West Wing, The Newsroom, Friends, Bette, Murphy Brown, Blue Bloods, and many more.
She lives on Tiny Farm with Chris Sarandon.
She can tango.
She has written and directed two films- “Morning Into Night” (a short) and the recently completed “The Grotto” (feature).
Andréa Burns is an American actress and singer, known for her portrayal of the hairdresser Daniela in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony Award-winning musical In the Heights, as Carmen alongside Nathan Lane in Douglas Carter Beane’s The Nance, and as Mrs. Spamboni in The Electric Company. Look for Andréa in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” this December.
Peter is a New York based director, writer and teacher who works both in new work development, as well as staging classic American musicals in New York and for some of the most notable regional theaters.
His New York directing credits include the off-Broadway premiere of Smart Blonde by Willy Holtzman starring Andréa Burns; the off-Broadway premiere of Curvy Widow by Bobby Goldman & Drew Brody; Rhapsody in Seth starring Seth Rudetsky; Lee Blessing’s Two Rooms; the 75th Anniversary performance of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town with Adriane Lenox, B.D. Wong, S. Epatha Merkerson; On the 20th Century with Douglas Sills & Marin Mazzie; Chess with Josh Groban & Julia Murney; Funny Girl with Bebe Neuwirth, Whoopi Goldberg, & Andrea Martin; Skippyjon Jones, and Junie B. Jones (nominated for two Lucille Lortel Awards including Best Musical).
Other credits include Andrea Martin’s one woman show, Andrea Martin: Final Days Everything Must Go; Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop; Gypsy at the St. Louis MUNY; Kiss Me, Kate for the Maltz-Jupiter Theatre where he has directed productions of Man of LaMancha (Carbonell Award, Best Director & Best Musical), Sleuth, & Other Desert Cities; and Into the Woods & Ragtime (Helen Hayes nomination for Outstanding Direction for both productions) for Ford’s Theatre where he is an Associate Artist.
Watch Past Events
Meet the Parent hosted by Anika Larsen with special guests Joanna Gleason, Andréa Burns, and Peter Flynn. Recorded live on Zoom November 3, 2021.
Meet the Parent hosted by Anika Larsen with special guests Audra McDonald and Ann Harada. Recorded live on Zoom February 7, 2022.
Meet the Parent hosted by Anika Larsen with special guests Cameron Crowe and Tom Kitt. Streamed live on YouTube on April 25, 2022.
Stay Updated
To get more information on future events, including when registration opens, fill out the form below.