Carol Hall is an American lyricist, composer, and musician. Her classic musical The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas won two Drama Desk Awards for lyrics and music, received a Grammy nomination for its cast album, and ran on Broadway  for almost five years. A national tour of Whorehouse ran for over a year and a half.

Hall also composes music for children's television. Her television credits include "Sesame Street", "Free to Be...You and Me" (Emmy Award), "Free to Be...A Family", "Thanks & Giving", "All Year Long". She also wrote for children's theatre, composing the music for Max and Ruby. 

Other stage work includes Good Sports, A Christmas Memory, Paper Moon, Are We There Yet, To Whom It May Concern, A...My Name Is Alice, and The Days Are As Grass.

Carol is a Lifetime Member of the Board of the Dramatists Guild, and Vice-President of the Dramatists Guild Fund. She also is on the teaching staff of the International Cabaret Conference at Yale University, and is a moderator at the Playwrights/Directors Workshop at Actors’ Studio, NYC.                     

Lesley Gore was an American singer, songwriter, and actor. She was discovered at age 17 by Quincy Jones and was signed to Mercury Records. She soon released her first single "It's My Party", which reached Number One on the US charts. With Mercury Records, she also released hit songs "You Don't Own Me", "She's A Fool", "Maybe I Know", "That's the Way Boys Are", and "Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows". In addition, she acted in several theatre productions and television shows including "Batman".  During this time, she also attended Sarah Lawrence College, graduating in 1968 with a degree in English and American Literature.

In 1969, Gore was dropped from Mercury Records, which prompted her to explore songwriting. She released two albums of her original work with label MoWest, "Someplace Else Now" and Love Me By Name", released in 1972 and 1975, respectively. In 1979, she was nominated for an Academy Award for the song "Out Here On My Own" which she cowrote with her brother Michael Gore. That same year, her musical play "Sweet Main Street", was produced at Playwrights Horizons.

In the 1980's and 90's, Gore mostly performed in nightclubs and wrote songs for film. In 1995, she made a brief appearence on Broadway in Smokey Joe's Cafe. 

In 2005, Gore released her first album in thirty years, "Ever Since". Songs from the album have been featured on tv progams including "CSI" and "The L Word".

Gore passed away on February 16, 2015 from lung cancer. She is survived by her partner of 33 years, Lois Sasson. 

Shirley Kaplan, painter, director, and playwright has worked extensively in theatre within the United States and Europe.

Her paintings have been exhibited in museums and galleries including solo shows at The Stable, Terry Dintenfass, and Hacker Gallery in New York City. Her first exhibit was at a very early age at the Newcomb Macklin Gallery on 57th St. Through art historian Richard Guggenheimer at Briarcliff she received a grant to study in Paris at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere and spent four years painting in Paris during the artistically active post war period of the 1950s. Returning to New York she began to explore collaborative, visual theatre projects.

She is one of the co-founders, along with Remy Charlip, Sudi Bond, and Judy Martin, of the OBIE-Award winning Paper Bag Players and she is the founder/director of Painters’ Theatre. She continues to work with visual storytelling and she has painted images for many of her own plays including The Connecticut Cowboy (music by Arthur Siegel, finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize), The Dream Box, Neon,  and Floating Cathedral. She designed and painted projections for all of Ben Bagley’s Cole Porter Shows and created original works for an early AIP film. She created paintings for Glen O’Malley’s Concertina’s Rainbow at the Cherry Lane Theatre.

She has written and directed plays at Ensemble Studio Theatre, La Mama, UBU Repertory, Playwrights Horizons, All Seasons Theatre Group, Image Theatre, Music Theatre Works, New York Performance Works, and the Zipper. She is a member of Ensemble Studio Theatre where she directed first productions of Richard Greenberg, Eduardo Machado, and many others. She has collaborated and directed with many companies developing original theatrical material and was commissioned to create a piece for Festival St. Archangelo in Italy with an ensemble of Italian performers.

Ms. Kaplan has been commissioned to create inter-disciplinary workshops based on personal stories and visual interaction for NYC museums and has led workshops at The Kitchen. Working with The Connecticut Commission On The Arts-Project Create, her early Theatre Outreach work was part of the basis for one of the first community arts projects in the United States. She is the founder and co-Director of Sarah Lawrence College Theatre Outreach program where she also was the Director of the Theatre Program and continues to be on the faculty.