Jenna Elser Wins The American Prize In ​Directing - The Charles Nelson Reilly Prize

Jenna Elser, artistic director of Glow Lyric Theatre in Greenville SC, is the winner of The American Prize in DIRECTING-The Charles Nelson Reilly Prize (theater/musical theater division), 2021, for "West Side Story". Jenna was selected from applications reviewed recently from across the United States.

The American Prize National Nonprofit Competitions in the Performing Arts, David (Volosin) Katz, founder and chief judge, is the nation's most comprehensive series of non-profit competitions in the musical and theater arts, unique in scope and structure, designed to recognize and reward the best performing artists, ensembles and composers in the United States based on submitted recordings.

The American Prize was founded in 2009 and is awarded annually in many areas of the performing arts. Applications for the 2022 contests are being accepted through the covid-extended deadline of September 14, 2021 with extensions available by email request. (theamericanprize.org)

Charles Nelson Reilly was a Tony Award-winning actor and Broadway stage director, and an acclaimed opera director and teacher. Far more than the zany television personality by which he was most often identified, Reilly nurtured the creation of a whole series of unique one-person stage plays. Most famously, he directed Julie Harris in her Tony Award-winning star turn in "The Belle of Amherst", on the life and poetry of Emily Dickinson. Among Reilly's many Broadway directing credits were Ira Levinʼs "Break a Leg", Larry Shueʼs "The Nerd", and the revival of "The Gin Game", starring Julie Harris and Charles Durning, for which Mr. Reilly was the sole American director to be nominated for a Tony in 1997. Mr. Reillyʼs career as an opera director included productions for Chicago Opera Theater, Dallas Opera, San Diego Opera, Palm Beach Opera, Toledo Opera, Milwaukee Opera and Opera Pacific. Charles Nelson Reilly and The American Prize chief judge David Katz were friends for three decades, first meeting through their mutual Hartford voice teacher, Mrs. Friedrich Schorr. Mr. Reilly served as honorary chairperson of the Friedrich Schorr Memorial Performance Prize in Voice from the competition's founding in 1990, until his death. To read more about the career of Charles Nelson Reilly, please click here.

Jenna's focus is on utilizing lyric theatre to enact social change. She is the co-founder and Artistic Director of Glow Lyric Theatre, which produces opera, operetta and musical theatre in direct response to the social and political climate of South Carolina. Jenna collaborated with Jasmine Road and Safe Harbor on her recent productions of Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and Carmen, illuminating the effect of sex trafficking and domestic abuse on Southern women. Other credits: Ella Enchanted (Synchronicity Theatre) Spring Awakening (The Warehouse Theatre) and Guys and Dolls (Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre). Jenna's devised work includes Armed, which reflects on gun violence in the US, and Pulse (AnamCara Theatre), a piece responding to the Orlando mass shooting. Jenna is a recipient of the Robert Porterfield Directing Award, a finalist for the Drama League New Musicals Fellowship and chosen for the 2020 SDC Observership Program. She holds an MFA in Directing from FSU.

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