Lonny Price

Lonny Price (born March 9, 1959 in New York City) is an American theatre, film, and television director, actor, and writer whose career spans more than four decades of New York’s performing‑arts scene. The son of Edie L. Greene, a merchandise manager, and Murray A. Price, a car‑leasing entrepreneur, he grew up in Fresh Meadows, Queens and later in Metuchen, New Jersey, attending the famed Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts before enrolling for a year at the Juilliard School to pursue professional acting. Price’s early stage work began Off‑Broadway with the 1979 production Class Enemy, for which he earned a Theater World Award as an outstanding debut performer, and he quickly moved to Broadway as the original Charley Kringas in Stephen Sondheim’s ill‑fated Merrily We Roll Along (1981). As an actor he is also remembered for roles such as Neil Kellerman in Dirty Dancing and Ronnie Crawford in The Muppets Take Manhattan, as well as guest spots on iconic television series like The Golden Girls and Law & Order. Transitioning to directing in the late 1980s, Price helmed the Off‑Broadway revival of The Education of HYMAN KAPLAN* (1989) and subsequently served as Associate Artistic Director of the American Jewish Theatre and artistic director of Musical Theatre Works. His collaborations with the New York Philharmonic produced landmark concert productions of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd (2000, starring Patti LuPone and George Hearn), Candide (2004), and Passion, earning multiple Emmy Awards for outstanding directing. In 2000 he co‑wrote, directed, and starred in A Class Act, a biographical musical that garnered his sole Tony nomination for Best Book of a Musical. Recent highlights include directing the 2016 London revival of Sunset Boulevard starring Glenn Close, the 2019 Roundabout premiere of Scotland, PA, and the documentary Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened about the original Merrily We Roll Along production, which was named a New York Times Top Ten film of 2016. Throughout his versatile career Price has worked repeatedly with celebrated performers such as Patti LuPone, Audra McDonald, Michael Cerveris, and George Hearn, cementing his reputation as a pivotal figure in contemporary musical theatre.