2023 All-School
SHOWCASE
Proudly Presented by Dominique Leonardi
Friday, February 10
Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture
The annual Academy Showcase is a community-wide celebration featuring top work from each of our arts departments, and we hope you — students, parents, alumni families, faculty and staff, prospective parents, supporters, and friends of any kind — will spend this special evening with us.
Each Showcase, The Academy recognizes a long-serving faculty member for their enormous contribution to our community and culture with the “Faculty Legacy Award.” This year, we are delighted to announce that Musical Theatre Chair Andy Robinson will accept our fifth annual award. Andy has been a fixture in the Academy community since 2007, and has led the Musical Theatre Department since 2011. We look forward to honoring him at this year’s event. Read more about Andy Robinson below.
More About Andy Robinson
Andrew Robinson graduated cum laude from Rhodes College with an Interdisciplinary Bachelor of Arts in English and Religious Studies in 1989, where he received awards for outstanding religious studies student and the Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award for service to the college. He received his Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University in 1996, winning the Travelers’ Fellowship for outstanding future educator. He received his Master of Science in Educational Theatre from New York University in 2006.
While in New York City he taught at the Cornelia Connelly Center for Education and the Village Community School—in both cases teaching humanities and theatre.
While at NYU he was a founding member of the company Shakespeare-to-Go, which brought free Shakespeare to school children all over the five boroughs, with the company traveling on subways with two trunks of props and costumes to get to gigs. In 2006 he moved to Chicago, where his credits have included work with Porchlight Music Theatre, Timeline Theatre, the House Theatre, Red Tape Theatre, and the Chicago Humanities Festival. For nearly twenty years he’s been an artistic associate at the Wagon Wheel Center for the Arts, one of the country’s longest-running summer stock theatres, where he has acted in dozens of shows, created youth programs, and directed productions.
In 2007 Andy joined the Academy to collaborate with Pat Rusk on the expansion of the Musical Theatre Department’s curriculum. Andy brought a commitment to producing Sondheim with the Department’s students, including Company, Into the Woods, Merrily We Roll Along, A Little Night Music, and Sunday in the Park with George. Other shows he helmed include City of Angels, Urinetown, Anything Goes, Grease, The Pirates of Penzance, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and most recently Head Over Heels. In 2012, Ben Dicke and he started the Academy Shakespeare Festival which has now brought 24 productions of Shakespeare’s works to the Academy over its decade in existence. All of these productions involved collaboration with creative professionals of both fellow faculty members and guest artists. Much of his work at both The Academy and the Wagon Wheel has been in collaboration with his artistic partner Ben Dicke. As part of the Humanities Department, Andy has taught 9th Grade English, American Literature, Shakespeare as Literature and Drama, and World Religions. In addition to directing and acting, Robinson moonlights as a designer, prop-builder, and scenic artist.