SHARON, CONN.: The Sharon Playhouse has filled multiple positions on its leadership team. The Playhouse has named Carl Andress their new artistic director, Rodney Christensen their new managing director, and Michael Kevin Baldwin their new associate artistic director and director of education.

“From the beginning, the Playhouse has been about overlapping: professional actors and aspiring thespians with local talent, theatre with education, beloved classics with newer works,” said Sharon Playhouse Board president Emily Soell in a statement. “This new leadership team is a perfect reflection of who we are as a theatre.”

The newly appointed arts administrators will work in a new three-pronged model of leadership.

Andress is a theatre and film director and producer who has worked throughout New York and in regional theatres. He was the co-recipient of Primary Stages’s 2022 Einhorn Mentorship Award. In addition to his work directing plays and films, Andress worked on the New York concert premieres of the musicals The Visit, A Wonderful Life, Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol, and Valley of the Dolls to benefit the Entertainment Community Fund.

Christensen previously served as the managing director at Southgate Education, a New York-based arts education company. He also spent eight seasons at Canada’s Shaw Festival Theatre, where he served as both the senior education manager and the senior manager of audience sales and services. The former executive director and director of education at TADA! Youth Theater, Christensen has also held leadership positions with the Warner Theatre and toured with the international education program Up With People.

Baldwin began performing with the Sharon Playhouse when he was 10 years old, and has since worked as a teacher, director, and playwright at the theatre. As the Playhouse’s director of education, Baldwin has initiated in-school performing arts residencies at multiple schools in the Sharon area. Baldwin co-created and directed the play #BraveSpace, which premiered at the New York University Steinhardt School’s Forum on Ethnodrama. He served as a keynote speaker for the Educational Theatre Association’s “Theatre in Our Schools” initiative. He is a graduate of Skidmore College and the City College of New York.

The mission of the Sharon Playhouse is to entertain the community of Northwest Connecticut and beyond, to serve as a teaching theatre, and to encourage inspiring actors and artists of all ages to develop their craft. As of its 2020 tax filing, the theatre’s budget was around $532,000.