Getting to Know Us
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Bios
Meet Hayley Goldenberg and Amy Andrews, the co-founders of Women & Theatre!
Hayley Goldenberg (she/her) is a New York City-based lyricist, librettist, and director. She is most passionate about creating new musicals that centre womanhood and the female experience. She is currently furthering her education under the mentorship of Sam Carner as a part of the Musical Theatre Writers Collective.
Amy Andrews (she/her) is a librettist, lyricist, dramaturg, and producer who lives in New York City with her awesome husband Keith and daughter Melody. Amy is passionate about intersectional feminism and centering women’s voices and lived experiences in creative conversations. She is a proud graduate of Scripps College.
Who We Are
Hayley: Amy, please tell us about yourself.
Amy: I am a musical theatre librettist, lyricist, dramaturg, and producer. I have loved musical theatre my whole life. I moved to New York after college to perform but quickly realized that the performer life wasn’t for me. So I left musical theatre for a bunch of years and worked in sexual and reproductive health and rights, which is another passion of mine.
Then just in the last few years, I have re-entered the theatre world as a writer and producer. I’m passionate about musical theatre that creates social change, that lifts up the stories of women and people whose stories have not historically been told in theatrical spaces. And I’m also really interested in how we can make the process of theatre creation more equitable.
Hayley, can you please introduce yourself?
Hayley: I am a lyricist, librettist, and director. I’m originally from Santa Barbara, California. I grew up in Toronto, trained in Vancouver, and now I’m living in New York City. I grew up, much like Amy, as a performer. Then in my last year of college, I realized I had a different mission in this industry. I wanted to use my leadership skills and my passion for social justice and equity to change the world from behind the table.
I took some workshops in musical theatre writing and got my first commission to co-write a musical about social media for teens in 2019. The same year, I workshopped my first original musical, “To Family!” And then I just kept doing it. I’m passionate about amplifying women’s voices and creating a new space in musical theatre for us and for marginalized and underrepresented people.
Our Meet Cute
Hayley: Should we tell the readers how we met, Amy?
Amy: Yes, we met on Zoom! As you do in a pandemic.
Hayley: It was a fate meeting.
Amy: We met in an online musical theatre writing class led by Sam Carner. As a mom with no childcare during the pandemic, I was desperate for a creative outlet and a connection to a community. I said, “Oh, an online class in the evening after my daughter goes to bed, that’s a thing I can do!” So I signed up for the class and met Hayley, and the angels sang.
Hayley: We would bring the feminist perspective into class whenever possible, which is where we really bonded. We had an assignment to pitch an idea for a musical. And I had this idea for a show about the lost women inventors of history called “Mother of Invention.” I brought it to class and got a chat message from Amy saying, “I’m obsessed with this, are you looking for a collaborator of any sort? What are you looking for?”
Amy: I was like, I love this, let me be a part of it. How can I be a part of it?
Hayley: And I said, “Are you a producer?”
Amy: And I said, “Yes I am!”
Hayley: So we had a meeting with my amazing collaborator, Marissa Davis. And again fate, serendipity, beshert, brought us together. So Amy and I are friends, and we also have a producer/writer relationship, and we are co-founders of Women & Theatre.
Amy: It’s a good thing we like each other.
Hayley: It’s a good thing.
Our Current Projects
Hayley: Tell me about what you’re creating and working on right now!
Amy: I’m doing a lot right now! I’m producing Mother of Invention, the wonderful show we just mentioned. I am also super excited about Women & Theatre. It feels like exactly the work I want to be doing in the industry.
As a writer, I’m currently working on an original musical called “Scenes From A Sex Shop.” It’s a series of vignettes based on my experience working as a sex educator, and I love the piece, it’s really important and personal to me. The message is about how we all have freaky, weird things about ourselves, and coming to the realization that we should celebrate those things in ourselves and each other rather than feel shame about them.
I also co-wrote an episode of a musical web series for New Musicals Inc. in LA, which is coming out in mid-February. It’s part of their web series “So Proudly We Hailed,” which tells the stories of U.S. veterans in their own voices. I worked on a team of all women and all native Spanish speakers (except for me - and I do speak some Spanish!). We told the story of Brenda Garcia, a U.S. Navy veteran who worked as an archival photographer and videographer in the White House under President Bush, Sr. and President Clinton. Brenda had AMAZING stories to tell, and it was great to have an all-women team tell the story of a woman who had been in the military, a world that is so hypermasculine. And I’m really proud of the piece we came up with. The episode is called “The American Dream,” and I wrote the book and lyrics for it and collaborated with the wonderful composer Isabel Guzmán, who is based in Costa Rica. And we worked with a wonderful dramaturg, Dana Iannuzzi, who is based in New York, and Brenda is based in LA. That was a team of fabulous women.
Hayley: You’re so inspiring. Love it.
Amy: Thanks! Tell us what you’re working on creatively.
Hayley: I’m working on a lot! Mother of Invention is very exciting. I am inspired to be working on a truly feminist musical. It’s so important that the world gets to know our five inventors - Hedy Lamarr, Annie Malone, Mary Kenner, Eldorado Jones, and Lizzie Magie - they are five INCREDIBLE women whose stories, for the most part, have been lost. We’ve been doing research and thinking about how different the world would be if we learned about them in school the way we learn about male inventors like Thomas Edison.
I’m also working on a musical currently titled “Plane Girl,” which is about a sixteen-year-old lesbian girl who steals a plane. The entire show happens in the air, she’s examining everything that’s led her to this point and dealing with the consequences of the crazy thing she's done. That’s gonna be a one-act musical written with Julia Sonya Koyfman and Canaan J. Harris.
I’m also working on another one-act with Julia Sonya Koyfman and Chloe Geller. The project is about Faye Schulman, a Jewish photographer during World War II who runs away to the woods to join the partisans, and her camera is her saving grace. It’s still in its early stages. Lots of little trunk songs and fun projects on the side as well, but those are my three main things right now - aside from Women & Theatre.
Our Creative Missions
Hayley: Amy, tell me about your creative mission.
Amy: I think I have two creative missions. One is to tell stories about amazing women with other amazing women. And to build networks of women in the theatre space, which is what we’re doing with this project.
My other mission, which is much more practical, is I want to fix the finances of musical theatre. It’s a big, big problem, and I am at the very beginning stage of trying to wrap my head around it. The cost of creating theatre has ballooned in the last fifty to sixty years. And we are having all of these excellent conversations in the theatre industry about people getting paid what they’re worth, and about equity and work/life balance. But the big elephant in the room standing in the way of all that important progress is that theatre is expensive to make, and the finances just don’t add up. We see now in this most recent surge of the pandemic, Broadway, which is the top of the industry - these shows are running on such thin margins that if you have to cancel a week of shows, a lot of the shows are closing for good. So that’s a BIG problem, and one of my long-term career goals is to find solutions to that problem.
What about you, what’s your creative mission?
Hayley: My creative mission, quite simply, is to make women feel seen and understood. When I’m writing, that’s my lens. As for what I want to do in the theatrical space, I’m interested in what it would look like to build an industry that is less hierarchical, an environment that is more collaborative and more equitable. What does it look like if a musician, an actor, a director, and a choreographer have an equal playing field in a rehearsal room? How can we uplift the creative integrity and the general integrity of a room so that integrity is just as important as efficiency? Right now, I see the industry as a capitalist, patriarchal machine made by white men for white men. What does a more socialist theatre look like? As a director, I treat actors as collaborators - I want to give everyone a creative voice, and I want people to feel that they have a stake in the work as much as I do.
Amy: I think they’re connected problems, because having spaces that are more collaborative than hierarchical is not an efficient way to do theatre. If we want to celebrate that more collaborative process, how do we afford that process? Because sure, in an ideal world, theatres would have unlimited money.
Hayley: Right, in order to have more equitable spaces and a theatre that is made in the name of artistic integrity and creative freedom and everyone feeling safe - because we are living within a capitalist society, we have to find a way to pay for it.
Our Thoughts on Womanhood
Amy: Hayley Goldenberg, what does being a woman mean to you?
Hayley: I love this question, and it’s also so hard. It’s softness and resilience. It’s strength and vulnerability. It is holding space for all aspects of what it is to be a human being. Those are the things.
Amy: I’m gonna share an image from Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse,” one of my favorite images in literature. Woolf describes Mrs. Ramsay, who is based on her mother, and the description she uses that repeats throughout the novel is “A butterfly’s wing on a framework of steel.” It is such a powerful image, and the juxtaposition of the delicacy and the strength, the softness and the power, is beautiful to me. When you talk about what being a woman means to you, that’s what comes into my mind.
Hayley: I love that. It’s funny, because growing up, I was very concerned about being “palatable”. But the feeling of needing to be that way was always juxtaposed with the women I looked up to. Jo March was my icon, I wanted to be outspoken, someone who stands up for what she believes in and takes no prisoners -
Amy: Which is basically who you are now.
Hayley: But whenever I would try to embody that, people would say I had a big mouth and -
Amy: But that’s a good thing!
Hayley: It is! But it’s something I saw as a burden growing up - as a young woman wanting to be accepted and wanting to be liked. For a long time I was so concerned with being “likable” that I wasn’t being true to myself. But during the pandemic, I had a reckoning with myself and realized that I was not doing the things that I believed in. I wasn’t using my power - I have a sharp tongue and a big mouth and a lot of charisma, and I wasn’t using it to make the changes in the world that I wanted to see. And so I made a commitment to be the truest version of myself.
And now, I hear other women telling me, “I wouldn’t have identified as a feminist before I met you” or “You’re so inspiring to me” or “You’re gonna be a part of this revolution that we need in the theatre industry,” and that is the highest compliment you could ever pay me.
Amy: I think that’s awesome. It’s so cool to see you at the very beginning of this journey of stepping into your power, because it is the very beginning.
Hayley: I know that I’m not old, but I wish it hadn’t taken me until now to step into it. I want young girls to know that the way their body looks doesn’t define who they are. I want them to be able to be themselves unapologetically. Even if they don’t know who they are, I want them to be free to explore that and not be so nervous about being palatable. Fuck being palatable.
Amy: I gotta tell you, as the mother of a daughter, those are things that are so on my mind. Constantly.
Hayley: Tell me more about that.
Amy: My daughter is three, so we are to a certain extent before an age where gender really starts to make a big difference. But society sends all of these messages, even to tiny children. And it’s a struggle. On the one hand, I try to do my job as her parent to curate those messages and help her interpret them in a way that will be helpful and not harmful. And then on the other hand, I also want to empower her so she can learn how to critically analyze societal messages for herself in a developmentally appropriate way. It’s a big ask for a three-year-old, and she’s a bright child.
It’s always an interesting time to be a parent, and it’s fascinating to be working to improve things for women in the world while literally raising a future woman. I’m trying to give her the tools she needs, not only to survive in the patriarchal world that exists today, but to survive and thrive in the better world that I hope we are actively moving ourselves toward.
Hayley: Amy, what does being a woman mean to you?
Amy: A lot of what you said resonates with me, about growing up as a tool of the patriarchy, feeling like I had to fit into a certain role. For me, going to college was a big thing. I went to a wonderful women’s college, Scripps College, and I fell in love with being in a community of women. I found that in a classroom setting with all women, there was a shared vulnerability in a good, healthy, exciting way. It was a very supportive community of women helping women, lifting each other up.
I go back to the image from one of your songs about climbing the ladder - the idea of a line of women all climbing ladders together, instead of working in a system in which only one woman can get up at a time and then she has to pull the others up behind her. That’s what it felt like to be in a women’s college, we were all climbing the ladder together. If one woman loses her footing, the women next to her are reaching out and saying “No, you’ve got this, and we’ve got you.” That kind of collective community is so important and so uniquely feminine. That doesn’t mean that only women can do that. I think men are totally capable of doing that if they can be in touch with the feminine within themselves.
Benefits and Limitations of Womanhood
Amy: Let’s talk about how being a woman can be a benefit to the theatre industry and how it can be a limitation.
Hayley: I feel like having a woman’s perspective is a gift. Being unafraid to get into the messiness or to do things differently than they have been done before. There’s a feminine perspective that’s lacking, and I want to bring that in, and so I feel like that’s a benefit.
Amy: The way things have been done and the established paths for success in musical theatre, they’re very patriarchal. So as women coming into this space, I think it is a benefit that we can recognize that and think more flexibly about how to shape our careers and our lives in theatre.
To me, one of the beautiful things about musical theatre is that you can get to the heart of issues. If we have a conversation about a controversial issue and I tell you what I think and you tell me what you think, we’re speaking to each other’s brains. Whereas, if I’m sitting in the audience at a show, an actor can sing a song and it completely bypasses my brain and goes straight to my heart, and that’s beautiful. In a culture where we are so deeply divided, that’s how we can make cultural change, by reaching people’s hearts. I think theatre is uniquely placed to do that. And women, because we can be so vulnerable with each other, because we can create spaces where that kind of vulnerability is okay, I think women are such an important piece of that work.
Hayley: In terms of limitations, like so many women, I’m not taken seriously a lot of the time. Also, I didn’t realize for a long time that I wanted to be a director or a writer, because I didn’t see many women doing it at a professional level. I remember seeing names of a few women writers, like Lynn Ahrens, Zina Goldrich, Marcy Heisler, Jeanine Tesori, but that’s really it, and I didn’t see a lot of women producers or directors. On the Tony Awards, when they presented Best Director, it was almost always a man. I came into my first-ever musical theatre writing workshop, and I was the only woman in the room. There were no Black people there. It was a very white room, a very male room. So it was hard to take myself seriously at first too. Then I realized, no, I need to be here.
How about you, Amy?
Amy: Specifically as a mother, my time is very limited. And it’s a constant struggle and it has been since she was born. As we’re doing this interview, it’s nap time. In ten minutes, she will get up and that’s when my time ends, and I also need to eat lunch! So time is definitely a limiting factor.
And the fact is that the industry is not made in a way to support parents or anyone who has caregiving responsibilities outside of themselves. One of our interviewees talked about the time expectations of auditions, people standing outside at 4am and waiting all day to be seen. Those are limitations of all artists but, as in many areas of life, limitations that affect all people in a patriarchal society will have a greater impact on women, because women are already seen as “less than.”
Hayley: And even more so with Black women, even more so with trans women -
Amy: Nonbinary people, absolutely. All of these groups are disproportionately affected by the limitations of our capitalist, patriarchal society as a whole and the theatre industry in particular.
Final Thoughts
Amy: Hayley, what are you most proud of in your life?
Hayley: I am most proud of the way in which I’ve been able to inspire women in my life. That’s a bold statement, but I’ve had so many wonderful women tell me recently that I’ve made them feel seen and understood and inspired. As I said with my creative mission, that’s really what I hope to do.
Amy, what are you most proud of in your life?
Amy: I’m proud of the patience and bravery I’ve developed in my life. It’s been quite a process. Becoming a parent was a big shift for me, it gave me a new perspective on what’s most important. In the past, when I’ve been interested in things and want to pursue them, if it doesn’t work out and opportunities don’t come right away, I just say, “This isn’t for me” and move on to the next thing.
But making theatre, it’s so important to me. And it’s important to do it in a way that’s true to myself and authentic. So because of that, I’m taking the time to figure out where my place is and what I want to do, and to find my people. I’m taking a patient and brave approach to this path that is unfamiliar to me, but I think it’s a good long-haul approach to a life in the theatre. So I’m proud of that. And I’m proud of my daughter, I’m really proud of her.
Hayley: I’m proud of you and her too. Amy, is there anything else you want to share?
Amy: I’m just so thrilled to be working on this project with you, Hayley! Every time we do one of these interviews, I get so inspired by the women we’re talking to. Every time I think about the work we’re doing on this project, it fills my heart with joy and excitement.
Hayley: I feel the same, ditto to you. I’m so grateful for this project and for you. We’re living in a weird time, and the only way forward is intentional action and conversation. I’m so grateful to be building a community with you.
Amy: And our lovely readers, thank you for coming to our project at the very beginning of it and being part of our community. We’re grateful for you.
Hayley: Thank you.
