Alexandra Billings is an actor, singer, author, teacher, and activist who has appeared on numerous television shows, including Amazon's Emmy and Golden Globe Award-winning Transparent. Billings, who has been acting since 1968, has also performed across the United States in hundreds of plays and musicals. She made her Broadway debut in The Nap in 2018 and joined the cast of Wicked as Madame Morrible the following year. Every role played by Billings is thought to be a first for an out Transgender human. She is the recipient of countless awards and holds an MFA in acting. Billings has lived with AIDS since 1995, and her LGBTQ and HIV/AIDS activism stretches across the continent and culminated in her moderation of a panel on Transgender rights in America at the White House during the Obama administration. She twice married Chrisanne Blankenship, whom she met in 1976 in high school, where they costarred in Twelfth Night. Billings has not touched Shakespeare since then--and vice versa. For more information, visit www.alexandrabillings.com.

Joanne Gordon is an award-winning director whose accolades include five Drama-Logue Awards, a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award, the Polly Warfield Award, and a Women in Theatre Red Carpet Award. Joanne is also an internationally renowned Sondheim scholar who has directed many Sondheim works worldwide, including the first Chinese-language production of West Side Story in Beijing. Other directing highlights include S/he and Me (conceived for Alexandra Billings); Indecent (named best of the year by both of Saint Louis's major newspapers); The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?; Disgraced; How I Learned to Drive; Evita; and Next to Normal. She is the author of Art Isn't Easy: The Theater of Stephen Sondheim and Stephen Sondheim: A Casebook, and she contributed to The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies and the Sondheim Review. Gordon is equally well known for her dramatizations of the work of Charles Bukowski. She received her PhD from UCLA.