Reflecting on his role as head of the Musical Theatre Program at San Diego State University, Robert Meffe emphasized that “The legacy I want to leave and the future of this program is not about me or about what I want to accomplish. It’s what I want my students to be able to accomplish, that every class that goes out there (after graduation) knows there’s a different way, a way that honors diversity, that honors accessibility, that honors inclusion.
“We honor the unique aspects of every single person, which is our superpower. What makes you unique as a writer or a director is your individuality.”
With this, Meffe pointed to program alumnus Julio Catano.
Having grown up in City Heights, Catano graduated from the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts, earned a BFA in dance performance from the Ailey School at Fordham University and enjoyed a career dancing in various Broadway shows before returning to San Diego in 2020 to pursue an MFA in musical theater at SDSU. It was back in his hometown that he founded the performing arts organization Teatro San Diego. Catano is now head of musical theater dance at Texas State University.
“What he’s doing,” Meffe said, “is taking his lived experience in City Heights and his experience in New York and leaving a legacy of his own. His life is about exposing young people, particularly people of color, to the craft and making a huge quantitative difference in the world.
“The future is Julio Catano, but also Julio’s students.”
Stephen Brotebeck, Director of the School of Theatre, Television, and Film at San Diego State University, and Robert Meffe, professor and Head of MFA Musical Theatre Program College of Professional Studies and Fine Arts School of Theatre, Television, and Film are shown in the school’s Main Stage Theatre on November 19, 2025 in San Diego, CA. (K.C. Alfred / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Centennial celebration
The future is an auspicious one for both the theater and musical theater programs at SDSU, part of the university’s School of Theatre, Television, and Film directed by Stephen Brotebeck. The 2026-27 season will mark the 100th year of producing shows at San Diego State.
The university’s MFA in musical theater program, founded in 1983, is, Meffe said, “the longest-standing MFA musical theater program in the world, by far. Right now we’re the only one in the country.”
Besides graduating students in undergraduate and graduate programs in theater, musical theater and theater arts with a concentration in design and technology, SDSU is a “driving workforce for the San Diego theater scene,” said Brotebeck, who has been at San Diego State for 10 years. “If you look at any playbill at any show at any regional theater in San Diego, SDSU is represented, whether it’s as actors or mostly designers, stage managers, assistants working in the prop shop at The Old Globe or La Jolla Playhouse.”
The School of TTF’s 2025-26 season exemplifies the ambition, diversity and enterprise of its theater programs.
Last month, the season opened with a concert production in its Main Stage Theatre of the Stephen Sondheim/George Furth musical “Merrily We Roll Along.” A collaboration with the SDSU Jazz Ensemble, it was co-directed by Brotebeck and Amy Schwartzreich.
This week, a 1980s reimagining of Shakespeare’s comedy “Twelfth Night” directed by professor Dani Bedau will run Wednesday through next Sunday in the university’s new Prebys theater. The Prebys Stage will also be the setting for a youth-theater production of Tijuana-born playwright Mabelle Reynoso’s “When She Became the Moon,” beginning Feb. 20 with Associate Professor Peter Cirino directing. Reynoso is a lecturer at SDSU, teaching among other things theater for young audiences and history of theater.
Next, Associate Professor Jesca Prudencio, who directed the 2023 world premiere of playwright Keiko Green’s “Exotic Deadly — The MSG Play” at the Globe, will direct a Timberlake Wertenbaker translation/adaptation of “Sophocles’ Elektra” in April.
The current season winds up in May with a new musical, “Tomorrow, The Island Dies.” Written by Ryan Scott Oliver and directed and choreographed by Brotebeck, the “folk-horror musical” is the latest product of SDSU’s developmental New Musical Initiative.
The two-year New Musical Initiative Program underwritten from outside the university by the Julia Brown Foundation, is designed “to get new shows written, edited, developed and produced,” said Meffe, who came to SDSU in 2013 with nine Broadway shows to his credit.
He called it “100 percent our goal” that the previous initiative musical, last year’s “In A Sunshine State,” will get a production “in a regional theater, in an off Broadway house (or) in a Broadway house in the future.”
To that end, the program has entered into an agreement, said Meffe, with York Theatre Company, an off Broadway company in Manhattan. “They are going to be producing some kind of production, whether it’s a reading or a full production of our New Musical Theatre Initiative project that we make in the next year.”
Brotebeck is excited about SDSU’s new Performing Arts District, which includes the renovated Main Stage Theatre and the Prebys Stage, and about the mentorship the students are receiving.
“What I love most,” Brotebeck said, “is the collaboration. Our faculty is top-notch. The sheer amount of professional work that the faculty does translates down to the work that’s happening in the classroom. Because the faculty has so much currency, students are getting a sense of what they’ll experience when they get out in the real world.”
That faculty includes “Twelfth Nigh” director Bedau, who is head of youth theater at State.
“My job first and foremost,” Bedau said, “is to teach people how to think, how to communicate, how to feel, how to listen. Those are skills they’ll need wherever they go. Our students leave ready for whatever comes their way as collaborators, as team players, as critical thinkers.”
In addition to routinely teaching in SDSU’s youth theater major classes, Bedau teaches an upper-division elective focused on directing and performing Shakespeare, whose canon she terms “a critical foundation to Western culture. Everybody should access it regardless of their comfort with the language.”
“Accessibility is my No. 1 interest in Shakespeare, which is what’s so great about ‘Twelfth Night,’” she said. “I’m always interested in figuring out who are the people performing and who are the people who are going to see this. It timelessly connects us to joy and wonder and love.”
This week’s production will make it seven times that Bedau has directed a production of “Twelfth Night.”
Denitsa Bliznakova is a professor and head of the Design and Technology Program at SDSU, which supports and collaborates with theatrical productions on Montezuma Mesa as well as the work of film and television division students.
Blizanakova, who came to the university 18 years ago, stresses the importance of her students’ roles as “visual storytellers. That’s the oldest form of entertainment. We provide a program that centers on that. How do we turn text or spoken word form into visuals on stage? Performance and design in the school (of TFF) has always been very strongly integrated.”
“As a designer my whole job centers around collaboration. One cannot exist without the other.”
Bliznakova said the design and technology program is at “a much higher level than even before. Our students are able to communicate ideas through 3D software programs, for example. They enhance the experience. We’re making sure that we’re teaching the latest professional practices. We started a new class in immersive design, which is growing nationally and which audiences are interested in.”
Graduates of the three-year design and technology program emerge ready to enter the fields of theater, television or film, she said, including in San Diego. “Our job placement is close to like 100 percent,” Bliznakova added.
One very recent graduate of SDSU’s bachelor’s program in musical theater just wrapped up a role in Cygnet Theatre’s production of “Follies.” Audrey Deubig, who played Young Sally in the Sean Murray-directed staging of the James Goldman/Stephen Sondheim musical, had performed before graduation in Cygnet’s “Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show,” Diversionary Theatre’s “Head Over Heels” and at San Diego Musical Theatre in “Legally Blonde” and “Winter Wonderettes.”
“I worked most closely with Robert (Meffe) and Stephen (Brotebeck),” she said of her college training. “I grew so much under their guidance. They really helped shape who I was as a performer and also how to find my voice. They are two people who instilled in me a self-confidence and a perseverance.”
While at SDSU performed in multiple productions, including two years ago in “Cabaret,” playing the prostitute Fraulein Kost, the first role, Deubig recalled, “where I felt like the audience didn’t like me and wasn’t supposed to like me.”
Besides learning that this was OK, “The program helped me build my book of material that I felt spoke to me,” said Deubig. “I was also able to rehearse going in for an audition and getting used to standing in front of people that I didn’t know and putting a performance on display for them.”
“I learned a lot about just being yourself and doing your best.”
Robert Meffe, professor and Head of MFA Musical Theatre Program College of Professional Studies and Fine Arts School of Theatre, Television, and Film is shown in the school’s Main Stage Theatre on November 19, 2025 in San Diego, CA. (K.C. Alfred / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Mid-career training
Like Julio Catano, Courtney Corey is a current MFA in musical theater student at SDSU who returned to higher education in quest of a terminal degree after having built a successful professional career. And how. Her credits include starring as Elphaba in L.A. and Chicago productions of the smash musical “Wicked.”
After originally earning her BA in theater arts more than a quarter-century ago, she soon joined the first and second national Broadway touring productions of “Rent,” first as a swing but ultimately playing performance artist Maureen Johnson. Fittingly, Corey directed the SDSU Musical Theatre Program’s own production of “Rent” this past May.
“I’ve always had this connection with State, even after my undergrad,” said Corey, who is also the founder of the Theatre Arts School of San Diego in Liberty Station’s Art District. One of her first inspirations was SDSU professor Randy Reinholz.
“Randy was my acting teacher,” she said. “One of the things he had us do was to write a mission statement. I haphazardly wrote down ‘I just want to do good work with good people.’ That was very pivotal for me because that has been the case. I’ve worked with wonderful people.”
It was from conversations with Reinholz that Corey realized that she wanted to work full time in a university setting. She began the MFA program in 2024 and will graduate next May.
“I remember Rob (Meffe) saying first day ‘I want you to think of this as giving a gift to yourself by doing this program.’ That’s exactly what this has felt like. I’m continuing to learn vigorously. I like being a beginner at certain things. That has been really exciting for me,” said Corey, who besides being a graduate student has directed (‘Rent’) and taught “Acting for Non-Majors” to students from design/tech, film or from the university’s school of Professional Studies and Fine Arts.
Corey has also taught for SDSU’s Musical Theatre Club, one of several student organizations on campus that produces established theatrical works. Another, Skull & Dagger Dramatic Society, is more than 100 years old and “the oldest student organization on campus,” said Brotebeck.
Meffe added: “Our student organizations are robust. They’re a way that students can have real ownership and leadership of their writing, of their productions, things like that.”
As the theater side of the School of Theatre, Television, and Film moves forward into the second half of this decade, Brotebeck envisions “leaning more into and developing more experimental work, new experiences all around. There’s great collaboration that can happen between our TV and film side, our design and technology side, and our acting side, especially with our new space (the Prebys Stage). There are ways to incorporate AI into theater making that can lead to some of these exciting opportunities as well.”
“We like to be at the forefront.”
Stephen Brotebeck, Director of the School of Theatre, Television, and Film at San Diego State University is shown in the school’s Main Stage Theatre on November 19, 2025 in San Diego, CA. (K.C. Alfred / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
The school has launched a new “Exploration Series,” which Brotebeck called “a second season, like an Off Broadway season from our Main Stage season. It features student work but also new work development, staged readings (one last month on the Prebys Stage was of Donja R. Love’s “Fireflies” in association with Black Renaissance Theatre) and various collaborations that are happening.”
In addition to continuing to grow the Musical Theatre Initiative, Meffe is heavily invested in the MFA in musical theater’s nurturing of future teachers of the craft, giving students “a toolbox of ways to carry on musical theater pedagogy to the next generation.”
“We’ve had 180 graduates of the program since 1983. Thirty-three of them are teaching full time at a university worldwide. It’s a pipeline to supply musical theater programs with various professors. They get out of here with really good skills but they also get the knowledge of teaching.” The SDSU Musical Theatre Program is currently accepting applications, which it does only every two years.
Meffe, who will tell you that he’s read about the so-called demise of theater in articles going back more than 100 years, is confident in musical theater’s survival and its place for teachers, performers and others.
“Musical theater has skyrocketed in interest over the past 25 years, particularly with young people,” he said. “People going to college to study musical theater has gone from like a handful of programs to hundreds of programs. There’ve been a lot of movie musicals made in the past 25 years. It’s all tied together.
“What makes me optimistic is that as much as we rely on our electronics and on social media and AI, I think the things that are going to survive are going to be things that are human. I find theater to be incredibly human.
“You’re not going to see a bunch of computers tap-dancing to ‘42nd Street.’”
David L. Coddon is a lecturer in San Diego State’s School of Journalism and Media Studies and a longtime local journalist.
‘Twelfth Night’
When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday, next Friday and Dec. 6; 2 p.m. Dec. 7.
Where: Prebys Main Stage Theatre, 5400 Campanile Mall, SDSU campus.
Tickets: $17-$20
Online: ttf.sdsu.edu/calendar