Fiddler on the Roof marks Tom’s seventy-seventh turn on the podium for Shenandoah Summer Music Theatre (SSMT). Since 1984, he has been involved as music director, producing artistic director, and sometime actor. It also marks his sixth turn working on this show at Shenandoah. In the previous five productions, he kept company with Hal Herman’s Tevye onstage as the Rabbi (SSMT 1985), Avram (1979 academic year and SSMT 1985, 2001) and Lazar Wolf (SSMT 2008). He’s delighted to finally be where he belongs: in the pit.

His most recent stints as music director and conductor include: Ragtime, West Side Story, Oklahoma!, Sweeney Todd, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Chicago, and Les Misérables.

He retired from the faculty of Shenandoah Conservatory in 2016 after forty-two years of teaching. During that time he music-directed sixty-six productions, including City of Angels, She Loves Me, Marat/Sade, 2014’s collegiate premiere of Green Day’s American Idiot, The Secret Garden, All Shook Up, Into the Woods, Sweet Charity, The Who’s Tommy, and Assassins. He was pulled out of retirement to serve as music supervisor for the conservatory’s 2018 production of Peter and the Starcatcher.

In addition to working in musical theatre, he is an active composer of concert and theatre music. For the stage, he has written or arranged incidental music for several plays, including Shenandoah Conservatory’s productions of The Elephant Man, The Crucible, The Diviners, To Kill a Mockingbird, Summer and Smoke, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Metamorphoses, and Peer Gynt. He also composed incidental music for the Short North Stage (Columbus, Ohio) production of Angels in America, Parts One and Two, and in November 2023 for the Short North Stage and Columbus Association for the Performing Arts joint production of A Christmas Carol.

In 2015, Tom succeeded SSMT’s founder, Hal Herman, as Producing Artistic Director, and retired at the end of the 2019 season.