Interview: Theatre Life with Susan Derry

Today’s subject Susan Derry is an example of an artist living their theatre life with a full plate of projects. She has several coming up that I promise you will be very interested in reading about. The first of which is her solo cabaret show entitled Ingenue You When: A Night of Music and Memory which will be performed at Creative Cauldron in Falls Church, VA on September 12th and 18th at 7:30pm. You’ll need to read on to see what else Susan has coming up because it’s quite a lot of artistic goodness to take in.

If you have been going to theatre in the DMV for any length of time, I guarantee you have seen Susan Derry perform. Some past local highlights include Francesca in The Bridges of Madison County at Keegan Theatre, Betty Schaefer in Sunset Boulevard at Signature Theatre and going on for both Lilli/Kate in Kiss Me, Kate! At Shakespeare Theatre Company. The latter also saw her performing in the ensemble.

In NYC she understudied and performed the role of Eileen Sherwood in Wonderful Town on Broadway as well as performing in many productions at City Center's Encores! series.

Other stage credits include many productions at New Harmony Theatre, several Bold New Works at Creative Cauldron and performing the role of Christine in The Phantom of the Opera in Hamburg, Germany.

She received a 2026 Helen Hayes nomination for Outstanding Lead Performer in a musical for her portrayal of the Governess in Conner & Smith’s adaptation of The Turn Of The Screw.

When not on stage, Susan is on staff at American University as an adjunct professor and a new job title she is very excited to share. Read on to see how a full time teaching job can work while rehearsing/performing in a show at the same time.

Driven, passionate, and extremely talented are all adjectives that unequivocally describe Susan Derry as an artist. Grab yourself some tickets to Ingenue You When: A Night of Music and Memory at Creative Cauldron and see why Susan Derry is truly living her theatre life to the fullest.

Who would you say had the greatest influence on you becoming a performer?

There is not a time in my life when I don’t remember singing - it was just part of me from the beginning.  And it was constant - I was always doing little shows and things around the house as a kid, like you do. But to really make a go of it?  My dad saw the performer in me, and he backed me from the get-go without actually knowing the first thing about music or theatre or the business of show. His encouragement was gentle and consistent; he paid real and steady attention to each of his kids. He asked very hard questions for sure, but never in ways that led us to doubt ourselves - he made us think. As far as my path was concerned, he made learning about music and the arts, part of his life as a normal human - a tone-deaf lawyer who played a lot of golf.  Paying attention is a very strong way to show your love. I try to live that out for my own son now.

Where did you receive your training?

I did my undergraduate degree at Northwestern University as a Vocal Performance major, and I got my master's in music in Vocal Performance from the Manhattan School of Music.

What was your first professional job as a performer?

My first professional gig was playing Luisa in The Fantasticks at a local company. I was fifteen and thrilled to be working with real grown-up actors!  And Liesl in the Sound of Music came right on Luisa’s heels - I spent my senior year of high school going back and forth to the Lazy Susan Dinner Theatre after school to do that show. I kind of was those girls at the time. So it all makes sense…

You are currently working on two projects by the writing team of Matt Conner and Stephen Gregory Smith. Can you please tell us a little bit about each project and also how did you come to know their work initially?

Matt and Stephen came into my life when I moved back to Washington after my years in New York. They welcomed me into the community and really looked out for me. Matt and I were on a production of Showboat together and then I got to know Stephen doing Sunset Boulevard, both at the Signature Theatre in Shirlington VA.  We had a grand time together and it was clear we believed in the power of creativity and in each other.
A couple of years later, they launched their Bold New Works. They were commissioned to write five musicals in five years. Kind of intense! These are two deeply creative human beings - their point of view combines a kind of cinematic majesty on the outside with real attention to the minutiae of life within. They have ideas upon ideas; as Matt often says, life is a series of commas, no periods. 

They came to me to ask if I’d create the Governess in their version of Turn Of The Screw, and of course I said yes. I’d done a lot of new works in New York, but to have an entire written for your voice specifically - well, that was special and also gave me the opportunity to dig into how my vocalism could become more than just “pretty” and how best to illuminate the story using as a level of commitment that brought me a lot of satisfaction. Screw was remounted in the fall of 2025, and Matt and I were both nominated for Helen Hayes Awards for our work on the show, which was a beautiful full-circle moment.
This fall, their show Monsters comes back to the stage - it’s the story of the night Mary Shelley’s idea of Frankenstein came to life, on the night in June 1816 at the Villa Diodati in Lake Geneva with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron.  It’s wild!  Mary Shelley allows me to examine the life of someone so intelligent and ahead of her time, but also so boxed in because she’s a woman. She is ever relevant. And we’re working on a brand-new show about the life and works of American poet Emily Dickinson. The show turns on how we relate to artists and their work - it’s a pretty unique take on how we see ourselves in what artists create.
As a great lover of books and poetry and the written word, these two - Mary Shelley and Emily Dickinson - really speak to me. I’m so excited and grateful to get to do this work.

You are also going to be presenting your solo cabaret show at Creative Cauldron in September. Solo shows take a while to come together for artists. How long have you been working on putting the show together?

They do take a long time!  And this one actually got its first outing back in 2014 - it’s the show that started me on this path of solo work. I performed it a number of times over the years here in DC, examining different aspects of my own story every time, exploring different songs and styles to say what I wanted to say in different ways. I got a bit better at the art of cabaret with every iteration. We took it to 54 Below in 2021, and that’s when it became what it is now: Ingenue You When, and Green Room 42 picked it up in 2023.  A lot of generous and very smart folks have helped me develop it: Warren Freeman, Julia Murney, Vibecek Dahle, and Aaron Posner. And my voice teacher and longtime friend, the magical Dan Thaler.  And of course, my forever cabaret partner - my music director and arranger Howard Breitbart, who has the patience of all the saints.

It’s about my life as a performer, of course - you can guess that much from the title. But it's really about so much more, because we artists - we humans, actually - are always about so much more. 

The show has been waiting for me to get better at cabaret and to grow up and into it a bit. My time at the O’Neill Cabaret Conference last summer inspired me and gave me a lot of courage and a lot of skills to do that growing up. It made me take a hard look at myself as a performer - was I really interested in just singing the songs in the prettiest way, or did I want to dig deeper? It’s scary to get that vulnerable and that truthful with yourself in front of other people! While singing! But getting honest with who you really are is the work of a lifetime and finding the courage to share that fuller version of yourself - myself, really - is the most satisfying work I have done or will continue to do, I think.

Along those same lines, your solo show is part of a cabaret residency at Creative Cauldron. Of all the venues you could have chosen to do your residency at, what was it about Creative Cauldron that made you think it was the right place?

Residencies like this are hard to come by unless a theatre company has a standing program. I had done a holiday show here every year as part of a curated series, and so I felt they might be open to it; the theatre already has a strong concert series called Passport as well as mainstage shows, so they were set up for it. And when the current administration made it clear how little they value the arts and artists through their attack on the Kennedy Center, I felt that establishing a place - however small - for this kind of work matters more than ever. It was the least I could do.

My goal with the residency is, of course, to get the opportunity to do the work - this will be my third solo outing in the year - and really hone my skills in this genre. But it’s also to bring the opportunity to others.  We have some good organizations for cabaret here in town, but no real consistent venues like 54 Below or Green Room 42 or the other venues popping up in NYC. My hope is that the residency becomes a kind of home for artists looking to do this work on a consistent basis, and for audiences to come and see the local artists they already know and love step out in this genre - to get to know them beyond the roles they play in town. 

Folks here are so talented and the kind of work that cabaret requires - honesty, vulnerability, looking at the world in a unique way - gives artists a chance to share that talent. We all just want to connect, and cabaret is just one more way for artists to give that gift to the community.

You performed the lead role of Francesca in The Bridges of Madison County at Keegan Theatre. That role is written for a coloratura soprano which is something you don’t see in many Broadway musicals. In some cases, there are operatic elements attached to the songs. Have you ever performed in any operas and if not, is that something you would be interested in pursuing?

It’s a gorgeous role and also an important one for a lyric theatre soprano.  And yes, it does lean to the operatic, but not so much that you feel distanced from the singer. At least I hope not!  In fact, I think what Jason Robert Brown did with the way this role is written - creating it on the marvelous Kelli O’Hara and Elena Shaddow - was to let the soprano instrument shine in it’s more traditional style right in the middle of the voice, which really keeps the text the most important thing.  It’s quite marvelous and I hope to do the role again someday.

Opera was my first stage love, and I did pursue it for a while after getting my master’s in it; I also helped found DC’s first contemporary opera company UrbanArias with my Northwestern pal Robert Wood – he’s an amazing conductor and the company was his brainchild. My constant work there was asking singers to let go of the more stylized choices so that the incredible beauty of the voice could get closer and closer to serving the text. It’s hard to accomplish, but it’s worth it. I continue to work on that for myself very much not in the opera world – opera it was ultimately not where I belong as a singer. I love to go to the opera!  

When not onstage, you are on the faculty of American University. When you are in a show, how do you balance performing with teaching?

Ah, that’s the question, isn’t it?  How do we balance the requirements of performance with the requirements of reality? Teaching is actually a great way to do that - as an adjunct professor of voice, my schedule is flexible, thank goodness, although it's a little harder when I’m teaching classes, or music directing and coaching the shows there, and this year I’m serving as Associate Coordinator of Vocal Studies. It takes a lot of energy to teach in that one-on-one way that vocal study requires - which is correct: it should take energy!!  But more importantly, teaching what we do allows us to do it better, too.  I learn so much from my students! I learn so much from having to distill what I want them to know in order to grow.  I love watching them come into their own. They’re a gift, and so are my fellow professors- our performing arts faculty is so strong and inspiring across the board.

What do you have planned workwise for the end of 2026 and into 2027?

More concerts!  I will do my holiday show on December 14 for the residency, and then I’ll be appearing with cabaret great Craig Pomranz for the National Capitol Cabaret Festival here in DC in March - a very exciting step for me. I’m on an album of songs by the late and very under-known and under-rated American song composer Gerald Ginsburg – it's called Dedication and it’s the music he wrote for specific singers. He wrote four for me, and they are quite stunning, and I’m honored. And of course, there’s Emily.

Special thanks to Matt Connor at Monster Productions for his assitance in coordinating this interview.

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