O'Neill Center's Paulette Haupt To Receive Killen Award at Critics Ceremony

Paulette Haupt, founding artistic director of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Music Theater Conference in Waterford, will be honored with the Connecticut Critics Circle’s Tom Killen Award, given in recognition of her 40 years of extraordinary achievement and service to Connecticut theater.

Haupt will be presented with the award on June 26 at the 27th annual event celebrating the state’s outstanding professional theater, which will be held at the Edgerton Center for the Performing Arts at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield. The event is free and open to the public.

Previous winners include Lloyd Richards, Michael Price, Gordon Edelstein, Michael Wilson, Lucille Lortel, and Carmen de Lavallade. Last year’s winner was Anne Keefe.

Terrence Mann, three-time Tiny Award nominee, will be master of ceremony for the event which begins at 7:30 p.m.

Since 1978, Haupt has served as artistic director of the National Music Theater Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. In that capacity, she has selected and guided the development of more than 120 new musicals including Nine, Avenue Q, Violet, The Wild Party, In The Heights, and Darling Grenadine, which will be performed at Goodspeed Musicals’ Norma Terris Theatre in Chester later this summer.

An associate producer for Polly Pen’s Goblin Market Off Broadway, Haupt has commissioned, developed, and produced new works for OPERA America, the National Alliance for Musical Theater, and Columbia Artists Management.

Following her San Francisco Opera debut in Carmen, for more than three decades Haupt was a music director and conductor of numerous operas and musicals in the U.S. and abroad.

As a pianist, Haupt has appeared worldwide in concerts with renowned musical theater and opera singers and was the only ‘Plaidette’ ever to perform in Stuart Ross’s Forever Plaid in New York.

Since 2001, Haupt has commissioned, developed, and produced new works with her New York Company Premieres, including several works by Richard Rodgers Award recipients, and a workshop of Lauren Robert’s .22 Caliber Mouth (New Millennium Theater Company, Chicago, 2004). She continues to develop Premieres and its very successful “Inner Voices” series.

Nominees for 2016-17 Connecticut Critics Circle Awards will be made public in early June. Winners in each category will be announced at the awards ceremony. Information: www.ctcritics.org.

DIRECTIONS: Edgerton Center for the Performing Arts, 5151 Park Ave. Fairfield Just off Exit 47 on the Merritt Parkway