The people

Anne Nygren Doherty

Founder and Artistic Director

Anne founded New Musical Theater of San Francisco, one of a handful of companies in the country devoted solely to developing original musical theater, and developed, directed, produced and staged its productions. She led musical theater workshops that served as many as 98 writers and directed the Round One Cabaret of original songs by Bay Area writers. Once the protégée of the legendary Broadway lyricist and composer Bob Merrill, she wrote Absolutely San Francisco, which played more than 140 performances at the Alcove.

Her career began on stage, as Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream in the first season of Shakespeare & Company in Massachusetts, and went on through writing, directing, composing and dramaturgy, alongside John Belushi, William Petersen, John Malkovich, Richard Dreyfuss, Tony Award-winning director Frank Galati, Tony winner Jayne Atkinson and Pulitzer Prize winner Milan Stitt. Her plays, including the award-winning Lead Birds, have been produced in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.

Today Anne is a medical hypnotherapist and a watercolor painter in Bastrop, Texas, painting flowers, desert blooms and the land they grow from. annenygren.com

John Doherty

Producer

John ran the technical and business side of the company and the Alcove, and served on the board. Over his career he produced, directed and worked as jack-of-all-trades on hundreds of film, video and multimedia projects around the world. During the NMTSF years he was also Senior Media Specialist at FX Palo Alto Laboratory, where he shares several patents for multimedia technologies, and taught motion picture and video lighting at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

The company and the Alcove were another step on the long road he had taken to be close to musicals, and to the idealized “show business” he saw in Singin' in the Rain on television in the sixties. Now retired, he writes essays at theaielder.ai.

Trevor Doherty

In-house orchestra

Trevor arranged and played music for our shows from the start; his arrangements are in the original Absolutely San Francisco. He went on to the Juilliard School and is now a professional composer writing original music for film and advertising. trevordoherty.com

Elizabeth Doherty

Box office, and everything else

Elizabeth was in her early teens during the Alcove years and helped with the box office and many other jobs, front of house and back.

Our young helpers Molly Proffitt, Heren Patel, Caleb Herring and Andrew Stapp pitched in too.