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Empowering Theatre Arts Professionals through Performance, Education, Networking, Service, and Outreach in Southern California | |
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Academy of New Musical Theatre
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 Editor Emeritus Lee Melville is practically a native Californian since his family moved from Utah to the Los Angeles area when he was eight. During his high school senior year, he was editor of the yearbook, bringing into focus his budding career in journalism. While attending UCLA, where he majored in English, he began his professional acting career, appearing in 1961 at the Ivar Theatre in Hollywood in Lawrence & Lee’s Only in America starring Herschel Bernardi. In the summer of 1962 he was at White Oaks Theatre in Carmel Valley playing leads in Bell, Book and Candle and Once Upon a Mattress. Next, he moved to New York and studied acting with renowned teacher Sandy Meisner. He was Producing Director of American Children’s Theatre which offered well-known classics including his own adaptation of James Otis’ Toby Tyler. He also presented A Christmas Carol, sponsored by Con Edison for disadvantaged children at the RKO 86th Street Theatre, and Peter and the Wolf with members of the American Ballet Theatre at New York City Center. After 10 years of producing theatre on the East Coast, he returned to LA and resumed his journalism career with a 12-year association as Editor-in-Chief of Drama-Logue as well as a theatre critic. He was president of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle and a member of American Theatre Critics Association for 25 years. In 1989, he was hired by Franklin R. Levy to write the tributes for the first Theatre LA Board of Governors Ovation Awards. In 1999, he was asked by then Theatre LA executive director Lars Hansen to explore publishing a bi-monthly magazine for the theatre audience. The first issue of LA Stage was published in autumn 2000. With support of the renamed LA Stage Alliance Board of Governors and the guidance of its Executive Director Terence McFarland, the magazine continued publishing for nine years until it launched into its present form of LA Stage Times in June of 2009. In 2007 he was honored with a Playwrights’ Arena Award for “Outstanding Contribution to Los Angeles Theatre.” In May, 2011, it was renamed in his honor, called the Lee Melville Award.
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