Jim Bauer and Ruth Bauer

Jim Bauer is an American composer, librettist, songwriter and performing musician. A classically-trained pianist and self-taught guitarist and singer who turned to rock music in his teens, he studied classical music composition and theory at Haverford College with composers and mentors Harold Boatrite and John Davison, and has since found the blend of “serious” and “popular” music he has been looking for in music tied to narrative: music for stage, film and television. He has written, arranged, orchestrated, produced, and performed music for all of the above while winning some awards and earning a few distinctions along the way. His award-winning musical play The Blue Flower was produced at the A.R.T. in the fall of 2010 and Off-Broadway at Second Stage Theater in New York City in the fall of 2011 (enhancing producer in both cases, Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, Pippin). In early 2012 he began a collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz (Anna in the Tropics) on a new one-person one-act musical titled Farhad or The Secret of Being that was presented by producer Paulette Haupt at Urban Stages in New York City in the fall of 2012. In honor of the sesquicentennial anniversary of the American Civil War, he is currently developing with his wife — visual artist Ruth Bauer — a new musical that looks back on those 19th century events from a 21st century perspective.  Ruth and Jim are writing the script, Jim the music and lyrics. The project is being d eveloped under the auspices of Harvard University’s American Repertory Theater.

Bio as of April, 2014.

Ruth Bauer is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design.  Her oil paintings, watercolors, collages and monotypes have been shown in group exhibitions in museums and in solo exhibitions in galleries across the United States, including The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Hudson River Museum, The Tucson Museum of Art, and The DeCordova Museum. Her paintings, watercolors and monotypes are part of notable private and public collections, and her work has been reviewed in a number of art journals and newspapers, including Art News and The Boston Globe.  Her artwork has been published on book jacket covers for Houghton-Mifflin, Viking, Harvard University Press and Orchard Books.  Ruth collaborated with her husband, composer/lyricist Jim Bauer, on the book, art design and video projections for the multi-media musical The Blue Flower.

The Blue Flower was most recently produced at A.R.T.-The American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA in the fall of 2010 and Off-Broadway at 2nd Stage Theatre in the fall of 2011.  Ruth has been an artist-in-residence at the HERE Arts Center in New York.  Ruth is currently writing and illustrating a fictional journal of an amateur woman naturalist from the nineteenth century who has traveled to the mythical isle of Kokovoko (the home of the charismatic cannibal Queequeg in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick) to document the flora and fauna there.

Bio as of April, 2014.