"The glamour, the color, the excitement
and the romance are present in healthy quantity..."

- Madeleine Shener, Backstage West

JUDITH SHUBOW STEIR
Book, Music & Lyrics

Judith Shubow Steir has been a composer and writer all her life. Her father's first cousin, Henry Lasker, a major Boston composer, teacher and colleague of Leonard Bernstein, was her mentor. Judy's first musical, FAR ABOVE RUBIES, although it has yet to be produced (some songs have been performed in concert), brought her to the attention of Robert Kuss who suggested the subject of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor as worthy of a musical. Judy agreed and embarked on a great deal of research including interviewing people who knew the legendary couple intimately. ONLY A KINGDOM has a strong development history and has acquired a flourishing fan base. Steir has also composed many other songs and musical pieces, including compositions for a musical in progress, CASANOVA, HIS LIFE AND LOVES and DEMONS IN THE GOLDEN SAND, a play about Edgar Allan Poe, setting some of Poe’s poems to music. She has also written industrial sketches, is a member of ASCAP and raised three children who have blessed her and her husband, Bert Steir, with eleven grandchildren.

Read Judith Shubow Steir's Author Notes on ONLY A KINGDOM >


PETER MANSFIELD
Music Supervisor, Arranger, Orchestrator

Conductor, composer, arranger, pianist, Peter Mansfield is a native Bostonian, having majored in music at Harvard College where he arranged for, and directed the world famous Harvard Krokodiloes, and where he later embarked on a 20-year tenure as Music Director and Supervisor of the renowned Hasty Pudding Theatricals. It was during this time that he met and apprenticed under acclaimed conductor and Boston Pops arranger Eric Knight, and studied with James Yannatos, chairman of Harvard's conducting faculty. In 1981 he began an ongoing affiliation with John Williams, Keith Lockhart and The Boston Pops Orchestra, where he has worked as pianist, arranger, and orchestrator, and music coordinator of several Evening at Pops P.B.S. television specials. Recent Boston Pops seasons have featured several Mansfield arrangements, including an original work for narrator and orchestra, CASEY AT THE BAT, and Peter now coordinates the annual collaboration between the Pops and Boston Conservatory.

Since 1981, Mr. Mansfield's symphonic arrangements have been performed by many major U.S. orchestras, and his arrangements are represented in the catalog of G. Schirmer, Inc. in New York. In September of 1988, he became Conductor and Music Director of Concert On Ice, the first-ever international tour featuring Olympic and World Champion figure skaters in concert with major U.S. and Canadian orchestras, for which he has conducted the orchestras of Atlanta, Dallas, Omaha, Pasadena, San Diego, Seattle, Spokane and Vancouver, as well as the American Symphony Orchestra, the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra, the Philadelphia Pops, the National Symphony Orchestra, and in a special national television production in 1995, the Houston Symphony. He served as Pops conductor of the Kansas City Symphony during the 1997-98 season, and more recently, conducted and arranged several programs for the Hartford Symphony during the 2003-2004 season. He has also guest-conducted Pops programs for The Milwaukee, New Hampshire and Vancouver Symphony Orchestras, as well as The Hudson Valley Philharmonic.

In 2005, he began an ongoing affiliation as arranger/ orchestrator for singer/songwriter Elisabeth Von Trapp, granddaughter of the legendary Captain Von Trapp of SOUND OF MUSIC fame, and he continues to compose, arrange and conduct music for Jacques D’Amboise and The National Dance Institute in New York, Boston and New Hampshire, an affiliation that started in 1985.

In the theater world, Peter Mansfield has served as Music Director/Conductor and Arranger for several regional and New York equity productions, including the Broadway-bound new musical ONLY A KINGDOM, as well as the legendary MUNY summer theater in St. Louis. A faculty member of The Boston Conservatory Theater Division since 2005, he served as Music Director/Arranger and Orchestrator for the 2007 BoCo world premiere of the new musical HEAVEN AND HELL.

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