Rebecca Hart is a NYC-based actor, altfolk singer/songwriter, and creator of innovative musical theatre.
Occasionally, all these things happen at once.
Born into a theatre family, Hart made her first stage appearance at the age of nine months and has been creating songs and stories for only a slightly shorter time. Highlights of her acting career include: five shows at the Actors Theatre of Louisville including two Humana Festival leads, the 2019 Public Theater National tour of 'SWEAT' by Lynn Nottage, a CT Critics Circle Award (for 'The Revolutionists' at Playhouse on Park), a CTCC 'Best Actress' nomination ('Midsummer, a play with songs'-Hartford Theatreworks), and her first (yes, first) Law & Order audition earlier this month. (Also, yes, that is her playing guitar in the Paramount feature 'Young Adult' w/Charlize Theron.)
As the the lead singer & songwriter for Rebecca Hart & the Wrong Band, she performs regularly at the Rockwood Music Hall; other recent venues include the Irish Arts Center, the Cutting Room, the Kripalu Yoga Center (MA), and the Brooklyn Americana Festival. Her 2018 album 'The Magician's Daughter' was produced in part by acclaimed Kentucky songwriter/cellist Ben Sollee and is available to stream. Other songwriting credits include Target Margin Theatre's 'Uriel Acosta' (Chocolate Factory), Woolly Mammoth's 'Gloria' (2019 Helen Hayes Best Sound Nomination), Aaron Jafferis' 'How To Break' (NY Hip Hop Theatre Festival, Spkrbox Festival Oslo, Village Theatre upcoming), and Melody Bates' 'The Cabaret at the end of the World' (NY Innovative Theatre Best Original Music Award 2017). An Associate Artist with The Civilians, she has performed in and/or made songs for the company at the Public, Joe's Pub, Kansas City Rep, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and BAM Fisher, as well as developing book & lyrics for 'microcosmos', a rock/theatre piece about neurodivergence for the 2019 R&D Group. In most of the above, she performed these songs as part of the cast, then was delighted to see them go on to be performed by others.
Hart studied Theatre at Brown University, trained as an actor in Meisner Technique at the Maggie Flanigan Studio, and later applied to NYU's The Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program after she found herself being hired to make songs for theatre more than once. After applying as a composer, she was offered a scholarship to study book & lyric writing instead. She is very happy she decided to accept this life-changing curve ball; her graduate thesis musical 'IRON JOHN: an american ghost story' (written w/Jacinth Greywoode) has been developed at NYU Tisch, Theatreworks Silicon Valley, the O'Neill Incubator Residency, and the 2019 National Alliance for Musical Theatre Festival, as well as being produced virtually at Temple University and the Manhattan School of Music in 2020. She was one of three librettists chosen for the Kennedy Center/American Opera Initiative; her short-form opera 'the barren(s)' (w/composer Amber Vistein) was filmed onstage at the Washington National Opera in 2021 and workshopped at New Opera West in 2022. In spring 2023, she will be in residence at The Cell theatre in Manhattan, developing 'How To Read Tarot Cards', her first solo play-with-music in quite a while (dir. Chloe Treat).