| Joe Banno |
| Director |
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| Over the last 25 years, Joe Banno has established himself as
an innovative, critically acclaimed director. In work that has been
called “joltingly powerful”, “audacious” and “engagingly freewheeling”,
he has brought his unique vision to more than 100 productions spanning
classical and contemporary theatre, opera, musicals, and film. As an opera director with over 30 productions to his credit, Mr. Banno’s recent successes with Verdi’s Otello for Washington DC’s Summer Opera Theatre, Sweeney Todd with Wolf Trap Opera, Le Nozze di Figaro for Opera Delaware, and La Tragedie de Carmen at the Alba Music Festival (in Northern Italy) have reconfirmed him as a challenging and original interpreter of the art form. Known as well for his work in musical theatre, Mr. Banno’s production of Evita – a collaborative project between Open Circle Theatre’s company of artists-with-disabilities and the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange – was a critical and popular hit. His world premiere staging of Executive Leverage received a Helen Hayes Award nomination for Outstanding Musical. From 1997 to 2006, Mr. Banno served as artistic director of Washington DC’s groundbreaking Source Theatre Company, where he nurtured the development of new scripts and directed works by a who’s who of contemporary American and British playwrights, including a multi-year cycle of plays by David Mamet. Celebrated for his culturally relevant updating of classic plays, Mr. Banno’s work in Shakespeare has been seen in eight productions at the Folger Theatre (where his staging of Romeo and Juliet won him a Helen Hayes Award), seven productions for Washington Shakespeare Company, and a twice-extended, year-long run of King Lear at Shenandoah Shakespeare’s recreation of the 16th-century English theatre, The Blackfriars’. Mr. Banno’s productions at DC-Area theaters have been nominated for 32 prestigious Helen Hayes Awards, winning eight of them. Besides his Helen Hayes Award, Mr. Banno is the recipient of the Mary Goldwater Theatre Lobby Award and the Bud Yorkin Award, both for excellence in directing. Mr. Banno’s work has been seen on stages across the US, including a co-production with New York’s Blue Heron Theatre and the US Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, the inaugural production of LA’s new Mutineer Theatre, a national tour for Opera Northeast, and productions at Theatre J (DC), Renaissance Theatreworks (Milwaukee), Marin Opera (Northern California) and Opera Theatre of Northern Virginia. This season, he’ll be directing two new plays for Studio Roanoke (VA). Having recently begun taking on film projects, Mr. Banno completed his first independent feature, Sleeping and Waking, in 2008 (further information and clips from the film available at www.sleepingandwaking.com), and currently has a Shakespeare-based film project in development, scheduled to shoot next year. A frequent acting coach, guest lecturer, conference panelist, and theatre consultant, Mr. Banno served as general manager for a NYC-based classical radio station, headed a new-works funding initiative for Opera America, and contributed articles on music and film to a number of publications. He has been a classical music reviewer for The Washington Post since 1993, and served as opera critic for Washington City Paper from 1989 to 2008. 12/21/09 |