Alan Shorter Email and Phone Number

Alan Shorter is a Professor on the Performance Faculty, Musical Theatre Area Head, and the Associate Chair of the Department of Theatre at TCU. He has also served on the TCU College of Fine Arts DEI Committee, Faculty Senate, and many other committees. Alan attended Minnesota State University – Moorhead, received his B.A. in Theatre & Drama from Indiana University – Bloomington, and holds an M.F.A. in Directing from Minnesota State University – Mankato. He also served as Interim Chair for the TCU Department of Theatre for the Fall Semester, 2018.Alan’s work as composer, music director, stage director, actor, conductor, and pianist has been seen at numerous regional theatres and in the national tours of The 1940’s Radio Hour, The Desert Song, A Christmas Carol, and The Student Prince. He served as the Music Supervisor and an Artistic Associate for eight seasons of The Trinity Shakespeare Festival.At TCU, he has been the stage director for productions of A Streetcar Named Desire, Tartuffe, The Women of Lockerbie, Closer Than Ever, The Elephant Man, Doubt, And the World Goes ‘Round, The Laramie Project, and Anything Goes. Other stage direction credits include Opus, Under the Skin, Wings, Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, Children of Eden, The Good Doctor, Tartuffe, … and They Dance Real Slow in Jackson, Nancy Drew: Girl Detective, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars, Sylvia Plath: A Memoir, Antigone, The Diviners, Lonely Planet, and A Night in November.As a composer, Alan has written over a dozen original scores for the theatre, including Anatomy of Gray, Spinning into Butter, Hamlet, Dracula, The Hobbit, The Voice of the Prairie, The Troubles: Children of Belfast, Strega Nona, The Velveteen Rabbit, Merry Christmas Strega Nona, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (produced in Russian at the Central Children’s Theatre of Moscow). Alan’s adaptation of Tomie dePaola’s Oliver Button Is a Sissy for the concert stage has been performed by over fifty major choruses nationwide and was featured at Carnegie Hall in New York City and the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. The concert work was also the centerpiece for the documentary “Oliver Button is a Star!” produced by Emmy Award winning producers Dan Hunt and John Scagliatti. The documentary aired nationally on PBS and has been given the National Association of Multicultural Education’s Media Award, Action for Media’s Pixi Award, the National Gay & Lesbian Journalist Association’s Excellence in Journalism Award, and Excellence in Media’s Silver Angel Award.