Simon Levy (born May 12, 1949) is an American theater director and playwright who has been the producing director and dramaturge with the Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles since 1993.
Biography
Levy was born in Surrey, England and grew up in
San Francisco. He graduated from City College of San Francisco with an Associate in Arts and San Francisco State University with a BA and MA in theater, and began his career as an actor in San Francisco, primarily with the New Shakespeare Company and then the Alley Theater in Houston, Texas. Prior to studying theater, he was a music major, played the saxophone, and was a jazz and rock-and-roll musician. He made his debut as a professional stage director in 1980 at the One Act Theatre Company in San Francisco, where he focused on the development of new work, directing many of the plays of Michael Lynch, among others, and at the
Magic Theatre, directing the plays of Lynne Kaufman, among others. He moved to Los Angeles in 1990 and joined the staff of the Fountain Theatre in 1993. He has taught playwriting at UCLA Writer's Extension and Chapman University, been a site evaluator for the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, and is a member of numerous theater and humanitarian organizations, including the
Dramatists Guild, Society for Directors and Choreographers, and Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas.
Selected works
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What I Heard About Iraq, an anti-Iraq War play adapted from Eliot Weinberger's prose poem and performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and Adelaide Fringe Festival (where it won Fringe First Awards) among other productions worldwide.
[ "Angeleno's play wows Edinburgh" Los Angeles Times August 27, 2006] (2006)
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Levy's stage adaptation of The Great Gatsby,
[ "On Stage: Seattle Rep superbly mines the essence of Fitzgerald's 'Great Gatsby'" Seattle Post-Intelligencer November 14, 2006] and was a finalist for the PEN Award in Drama.[ "Literary awards season" LAObserved.com July 31, 2007] (2007)
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F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon and Tender is the Night.
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Award-winning and critically acclaimed premiere of Stephen Sachs' Cyrano
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Mark Harelik's The Immigrant for Sierra Madre Playhouse, where it received rave reviews.
Awards and recognition
Levy is the recipient of numerous directing and producing awards, including the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle's Milton Katselas Career Achievement Award in Directing.
External links
