John Lahr (born July 12, 1941) is an American theater critic, and the son of actor Bert Lahr. Since 1992, he has been the senior drama critic at The New Yorker magazine.

Born in Los Angeles, California, Lahr holds a B.A. from Yale University and a master's degree from Worcester College, Oxford. He has written many books, including the novels The Autograph Hound and Hot to Trot, as well as three biographies of important theatrical figures: one of his father called Notes on a Cowardly Lion; one of the British playwright Joe Orton called Prick Up Your Ears; and one of the Australian comedian Barry Humphries called Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization: Backstage with Barry Humphries. In 1987 he co-produced a film version of Prick Up Your Ears directed by Stephen Frears and written by Alan Bennett in which Lahr appeared as a character played by Wallace Shawn. Lahr also wrote the foreword to Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines, a 1994 collection of Bill Hicks's work.

William Melvin "Bill" Hicks (December 16, 1961 – February 26, 1994) was an American stand-up comedian, social critic, satirist, and musician. His material largely consisted of general discussions about society, religion, politics, philosophy, and personal issues. Hicks' material was often controversial and steeped in dark comedy. In both his stand-up performances and during interviews, he often criticized consumerism, superficiality, mediocrity, and banality within the media and popular culture, describing them as oppressive tools of the ruling class, meant to "keep people stupid and apathetic".

Hicks was 16 years old when he started performing stand-up comedy at the Comedy Workshop in Houston, Texas, in 1978. During the 1980s he toured the United States extensively and performed a number of high profile television appearances. It was in the UK, however, where Hicks first amassed a significant fan base, packing large venues with his 1991 tour. Hicks died of pancreatic cancer in 1994 at the age of 32. In the years after his death, his work and legacy achieved acclaim in creative circles. In 2007 he was voted the fourth-greatest stand-up comic on the UK's 100 Greatest Stand-Ups on Channel 4, and appeared again in the updated 2010 list as the fourth-greatest comic.

Elizabeth Ashley (born August 30, 1939) is an American actress who first came to prominence as the ingenue in the Broadway play Take Her, She's Mine, which earned her a Tony Award as Best Featured Actress in a Play.

Ashley was born Elizabeth Ann Cole in Ocala, Florida, the daughter of Lucille (née Ayer) and Arthur Kingman Cole, and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Ashley earned a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for the play Take Her, She's Mine (1962), then later starred as Corie in the original Broadway production of Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park (1963) and, later, her defiantly sexual Maggie was praised^{[citation needed]} in a successful Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1974). Ashley received Tony nominations for both performances. She also appeared on Broadway as Dr. Livingstone in Agnes of God (1982). She was also a replacement in the role of Mattie Fae during the original Broadway run of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play August: Osage County.

David Ives (Chicago, July 11, 1950 – ) is a contemporary American playwright. A native of South Chicago, Ives attended a minor Catholic seminary and Northwestern University and, after some years' interval, Yale School of Drama, where he received an MFA in playwriting. In the interval between studies at Northwestern and Yale he worked for three years as an editor at Foreign Affairs magazine.

In the mid-1990s, after having been a contributor to Spy Magazine, Ives wrote occasional humor pieces for the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and other publications. In that same period, New York magazine named him one of the "100 Smartest New Yorkers".

Ives' first play in New York was Canvas, staged at the Circle Repertory Company in 1972, followed at the same theatre by Saint Freud in 1975. In the late 1980s, his one-act comedies began to appear annually in the Manhattan Punch Line's yearly one-act play festival, among them: Sure Thing, Words, Words, Words, Variations on the Death of Trotsky, Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread, and The Universal Language. Ives' most popular book of plays is All in the Timing, which originated as an evening of one-act comedies that premiered at Primary Stages in 1993, moved to the larger John Houseman Theatre, and ran for 606 performances. The production won him the Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award for Playwriting.

John Doyle is a Tony Award winning Scottish stage director for musicals and plays, as well as operas. He has served as artistic director at several regional theatres in the United Kingdom, where he has staged more than 200 professional productions during his career spanning 30 years.

Doyle trained at the University of Georgia in the United States. He was associate director of the Watermill Theatre, a 216-seat performance space in the English countryside of Berkshire until 2008. With his work there he has become known for his unusual approach to musical theatre, often featuring casts who are both actors and musicians, accompanying one another on musical instruments while simultaneously playing roles.

His 2004 staging of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd moved from the Watermill to the West End of London in 2005 (first to Trafalgar Studios and then the Ambassadors Theatre). In November 2005 he re-mounted Sweeney on Broadway, with Michael Cerveris playing the "demon barber" and Patti LuPone as Mrs. Lovett. For this production, he received the 2006 Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical.