Interview: Georgia Stitt on Navigating Her Art and Activism: 'It’s a Balancing Act

Who run the Broadway world? Girls. This March, BroadwayWorld is excited to spotlight five incredible female theatre-makers who are changing the game from offstage. In this second edition of 'Female Theatremakers' we are catching up with the wonderful composer and lyricist, Georgia Stitt. 

'Female Theatremakers' is sponsored by Roundabout Theatre Company's world-premiere of Liberation. From Tony Award nominees Bess Wohl (Grand Horizons) and Whitney White (Jaja’s African Hair Braiding) comes a provocative, revealing, and irreverent jolt of a play about what really goes on when women meet behind closed doors. Liberation - now extended through April 6 only. 

Georgia Stitt describes herself as a “professional juggler.” Stitt is a composer/lyricist who’s done everything from writing commissioned musicals to assistant conducting “Little Shop of Horrors” on Broadway to releasing albums of original music sung by Broadway’s best to music directing the screen adaptation of “13 the Musical” for Netflix – and that’s barely scratching the surface.

“It's a silly thing,” Stitt laughed while describing her juggling to BroadwayWorld. “But I sometimes think that figuring out how to juggle all of those things and make sure that I don't spend too much time without dropping a ball — going too long without writing or going too long without playing or too long without taking care of this organization — that is all a balancing act.

The organization she’s referring to is Maestra Music. Stitt is the founder and president of the nonprofit, which has provided support, visibility, and community to women and non-binary musicians working in the theater industry for well over five years. The aim isn’t to take jobs from qualified musicians; it’s to create gender equity of opportunity within the theater industry.

“It's not like we're trying to get to 50%, that's not the goal,” Stitt said of boosting the number of female and non-binary musicians working in the industry. “What we're trying to do is is create a workforce that has more diversity in it, and to make sure that the women and non-binary people who are able to do these jobs can be found by the people who are doing the hiring — and then let the best person get the job for sure.”

Now in talking about this, Stitt is adamant that her work with Maestra doesn’t mean she no longer hires men to play with her. “That's not true,” she said. She still plays with the same “go-to guys,” as she described them — but they’re now interspersed with female and non-binary counterparts, as there’s more intentionality behind her musician hires.

The road to Maestra began when Stitt was working on the Off-Broadway revival of “Sweet Charity” in 2016 and was asked to assemble an all-female pit. “I want it to look like New York,” Stitt recalled director Leigh Silverman saying of the orchestra. But that presented Stitt with an interesting challenge. “That was the first time I had to acknowledge my own biases,” she said. Stitt said that, at that time, all of her go-to musicians were men. 

“There was something about like, wow, even I don't have these people in my address book, I mean, even I don't know who they are,” Stitt said. “And what are the systems that have kept them invisible for me, those musicians that we're looking for, and what do I have to acknowledge myself?”

As Stitt set out to find female and non-binary musicians, she began to cultivate quite a community. Today, Maestra has grown so rapidly since 2019 that the organization now has a database of over 1,500 female and non-binary musicians. And not only that – there are regional groups in big cities around the country and even internationally where people affiliated with Maestra have gathered and built networking communities.

But getting to that point was a balancing act.

As Maestra grew initially, Stitt found that little was known about the demographics of pit musicians in New York City. So Stitt worked with Local 802, the musicians’ union in New York City, to learn more about its members. An initial 2021 study conducted jointly by Maestra and Local 802 revealed that only 29% of the musicians’ union members were female-identifying — and just 22% of musicians who work specifically on Broadway were female-identifying. And 25% of Broadway orchestras didn’t have a single woman or non-binary pit musician.

Clearly, there was work to do. But the latest update to those statistics, published in Local 802’s Allegro Magazine on March 1, revealed a substantial increase in the representation of women and non-binary people in both pit orchestras and music team leadership. Since Maestra was founded in 2019, the number of new Broadway shows with all-male orchestra pits has dropped from 25% to 0%. And the number of female and non-binary musicians jumped from 37% in pits and 25% on music teams in the 2022-2023 Broadway season to 39% and 28%, respectively, during the 2023-2024 season. 

Now, on the heels of the latest report, Stitt is preparing for Maestra’s fifth annual Amplify event featuring a bevy of Broadway’s best and spotlighting the musicians that lead the organization’s charge. Hosted by Tony nominee L Morgan Lee, the evening will feature the talents of Sara Bareilles, Kate Baldwin, Jordan Fisher, Khaila Wilcoxon, Jessica Vosk, and more — accompanied by, of course, an all-Maestra band.

Stitt shared that this is an especially exciting time for Maestra as the organization is in the process of hiring an executive director for the first time. And while it may mean Stitt is turning a page in that Maestra chapter of her book, it’s one she’s embracing.

“I'm looking forward to a chapter that allows me to continue to be deeply committed to and engaged in the workings of Maestra, but not the person who runs it day-to-day,” Stitt shared. “And the reason we're making that shift is because I'm hungry to get back to the musical work that was guiding me before Maestra was born.”

That work involves new music and other personal goals — including Broadway.

“I think I still have dreams of being able to work at that level as a composer,” Stitt shared. She acknowledged that achieving that goal might require her to be “less of a multi-hyphenate.” But her Broadway dream is also an opportunity she doesn’t want to miss out on because she was busy with something else.

“For me, a really good year allows me to have a lot of opportunity to do both; like maybe something I created or wrote, and getting to perform with an orchestra or work on somebody’s show,” Stitt said. And Maestra “fits into the spaces around that,” she added.

“That, to me, is the balancing act of what a career looks like.”

AMPLIFY 2025 will be held on March 31st at Sony Hall in New York City. Tickets and more information can be found here.