Music & Lyrics by Jonathan Spivey
from The All Night Strut
Music & Lyrics by Jonathan Spivey
Music & Lyrics by Jonathan Spivey
Performed by Erica Spyres
While his first love is acting, Jonathan has played the piano since the age of six. His original songs feature lyrics that celebrate wordplay with a musical style honoring the Great American songbook. The satirical parody songs of Tom Lehrer have also been a major influence.
As a playwright, Jonathan’s most recent script Poor White Moron examines the historical events surrounding the infamous 1927 Supreme Court Case Buck v. Bell. The play with music tells the heartbreaking story of Carrie Buck who was wrongfully institutionalized in Virginia in 1924 and sterilized against her will at the height of the American eugenics movement. The play received a developmental reading at Firehouse Theatre in Richmond Virginia in February 2025.
Jonathan’s one-man-and-a-piano show Rodgersandhart chronicles the tragic decline of famed lyricist Lorenz Hart. The eighty minute play with music features some of Rodgers and Hart’s most iconic songs like Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, Blue Moon, and The Lady Is A Tramp. Jonathan workshopped the show at Radford University in Virginia in March 2018 after a successful staged reading at Dixon Place in New York City the year before. The script began as Jonathan’s thesis in 2012 during his graduate studies at the University of San Diego.
Talmadge & Ray, a play with music written with frequent collaborator Andy Nagraj, is set in a small Southern Baptist Church. The comic play with music explores the unexpected friendship between closeted choir director Talmadge Fox and Indian American plumber Ray Patel using sitcom-style humor. A finalist in the inaugural SoQueer Playwriting Festival, the script received developmental workshops at Silk Road Rising in Chicago and Dixon Place in New York City.
The team also co-wrote the musical comedy Murphy’s Law, which received its received its professional premiere in Pittsburgh in the spring of 2016 after workshops and readings in San Diego, Michigan, Utah, and Virginia, and at Dixon Place in New York City. The show follows the plight of everyman Dave Spring who sets out on a road trip in search of answers when everything that can go wrong does go wrong.
Jonathan Spivey 