Jonathan Monro

Background

Jonathan grew up in Saint John"s, Newfoundland. His father, David Weiser (formerly a traveling salesman from Montreal) co-founded the Newfoundland Traveling Theatre Company in 1972.

Education

Jonathan attended Holy Heart of Mary High School in Saint John"s, graduating in 1992.

Career

An actor, writer, composer, pianist, singer, and musical director, his first major appearance was as a pianist at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York City in 1991. Jonathan"s first pursuit was piano, and he made his first major appearance at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York City at the age of 16. The following year, as he was preparing for the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, he began experiencing blackouts and seizures while playing and even listening to the piano.

He was forced to quit playing, and decided to pursue theatre.

In an interview, he was quoted as saying,

"I always had a suspicion that theatre was my first love. My body proved that suspicion.

lieutenant was deeply upsetting, but I have faith that the hours spent at the piano will someday pay official". Two years later, in 1997, Jonathan made his professional theatre debut at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Canada in Camelot, The Taming of the Shrew, and Coriolanus.

He returned the following year, furthering his classical theatre studies in the John Sullivan Hayes Training Program, and traveled with the Stratford Festival to New York, where he made his Broadway debut in The Miser and Much Ado About Nothing.

In 1998, he was cast in the first national United States. tour of 2 Pianos, 4 Hands. Since then, Jonathan has performed in over seventy productions for stage, radio, television and film, and has appeared in almost every regional theatre in Canada, and in many in the United States. He was also featured in the pilot/first episode of the CTV/Columbia Broadcasting System series Flashpoint, the original Canadian cast of The Producers, and starred in the North American premiere of Glorious.

As a composer, lyricist, and bookwriter, Jonathan has written over twenty original pieces for theatre, including the recent world premieres of AfterImage, and Fear of Flight (which will be featured at the Cultural Olympiad in Vancouver, February 2010).

Calgary Sun theatre critic Louis B. Hobson wrote in one of his reviews: “Monro deserves to be compared to such giants as Sondheim and Lehrer”. Jonathan will musically direct the Canadian Premiere of the Broadway hit The Light in the Piazza, by Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel starting January 2010.

Achievements

• In April 1993, he won third prize in the Johanna Hodges International Piano Competition in Palm Springs, California. That year, he won the Louis Applebaum Tyrone Guthrie Award for his musical contribution to the festival. His first large role in a film was in Heyday!, by Gordon Pinsent, which won a prestigious Silver Hugo Award at the Chicago Film Festival. His musical, Variations on a Nervous Breakdown, won four Betty Mitchell Awards (including two for Monro), and he has two new shows slotted for production in the 2009–2010 season.