NORMAN MATHEWS is a composer, author, playwright. and librettist. His autobiography, The Wrong Side of the Room, A Life in Music Theater, will be published by Eburn Press October 26, 2018..
He has been News Editor of Dance Magazine, Managing Editor of Sylvia Porter’s Personal FinanceMagazine, and Editorial Director of inhouse publications at Merrill Lynch. His articles have appeared in Common Dreams and the Times of Sicily.
As a composer, Mathews’s music was featured, along with the works of John Kander, and Charles Strouse, at the Kennedy Center in a program of classical music written by theatre composers. Mathews’s one-woman musical play about Dorothy Parker, You Might as Well Live, has been performed by Tony-Award-winner Michele Pawk and Broadway star Karen Mason. The
play, in which Mrs. Parker’s verses are set to music, received a Vogelstein Foundation Playwriting Grant and was a finalist for the Stanley Drama Award and the Mill Mountain Playhouse Best Play Competition. Along with three Pulitzer-Prize finalists, You Might as Well Live was selected for a festival of new plays at the Orlando Shakespeare Theatre.
La Lupa, an opera for which Mathews wrote the libretto and score, is based on the novella by Giovanni Verga, author of Cavalleria Rusticana. The piece was selected for the Ft. Worth Opera’s showcase of new works.
His newest play, Drone, which examines the human cost of drone warfare on two parallel families, is scheduled to have a reading directed by Michele Pawk this fall.
Rossetti Songs, set to poems by Christina Rossetti, was recorded by Navona Records. and broadcast on public radio. His song cycle, Songs of the Poet, composed to Walt Whitman poetry, waspremiered in Germany by Gregory Wiest, an American tenor with the Munich Opera. Wiest recorded the work for Capstone Records. It has been performed throughout the world. Mathews’
Sonnet No. 61, set to Shakespeare, for chorus, piano, and oboe won the VocalEssence choral award.
His cabaret works have been performed by Liz Callaway (Tony nominee), and Debbie Gravitte (Tony Award). Mathews began his career as a Broadway and film dancer-singer-actor, during which he worked with Barbra Streisand, Gene Kelly, and Dorothy Lamour. He holds both a bachelor’s and master’s
degree. His music is published by Graphite Publishing.