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Maestra Music Is Revolutionizing Gender Parity in Theatre

Thanks to the non-profit founded by Georgia Stitt, “I don’t know who the women are” will never be an excuse again.

by Ruthie Fierberg

Maestra musicians (Georgia Stitt)

It began with Sweet Charity.

In 2016, director Leigh Silverman hired Georgia Stitt to music direct her Off-Broadway revival starring Sutton Foster, and Silverman wanted an all-female band. That’s when Stitt and orchestrator Mary-Mitchell Campbell realized: They didn’t know of enough women musicians to fill the orchestra.

“We called the regular guys that we always play with and were like, ‘Who are the women that we should be hiring?' And nobody had the answer,” says Stitt. “It called our own biases into question too, because we were like, ‘Why don't we know them?’”

Stitt became obsessed with not only assembling her Charity band but building a bench. Though she began making a spreadsheet of musicians to hire, the music director recognized the need to expand her scope far beyond instrumentalists.

Where Are All the Ladies?
Aside from Charity, a hunger for female representation bombarded Stitt—from the audience member exclaiming she’d never seen a woman songwriter front and center to the grad student who complained that there were zero women composers on her music comp syllabus. So Stitt made a list of 22 living and working composers and invited them to a meet-up, which continues on a monthly basis to this day for a list that has grown to 173.