Starlight Express Credits[]
Japan/Australia - 1987 - Director for Japan and Australia
London - 1988-89 - Associate Director
Biography (1987)[]
Dion McHugh was born in Toronto. After training as an actor at the Drama Department of Ryerson Polytechnic he joined Canada's Stratford Shakespearean Festival Company as an actor and assistant director (Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, As You Like It, Titus Andronicus, Love's Labour's Lost, The Winter's Tale, The Taming of the Shrew, Henry IV Part Two, The Devils, Miss Julie).
He was invited to England by Michael Elliott's Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, where he directed their "Season of Contemporary Plays" (Feiffer's People, The Technicians, Chamber Music). As Associate Artistic Director of the Coliseum Theatre, Oldham, his nationally acclaimed productions of The Rocky Horror Show, Tommy, Cracks by Martin Sherman and Joseph Heller's Catch-22 earned him the Arts Council's Associate Director's Award.
Freelance productions which he had directed in London, the Regions and Canada include She Touched Me by Tennessee Williams, Coward's Blithe Spirit, Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra and numerous new plays. London West End credits include Artistic Co-ordinator of Blondel by Tim Rice and Stephen Oliver, associate director of Les Miserables by Claude-Michel Schoenberg, Alain Boubil and Herbert Kretzmer, and Associate Director of Starlight Express in London and New York. He directed the original workshop of Andrew Lloyd Webber's newest musical Phantom of the Opera.
Current and future productions which he will direct include Starlight Express in Japan, Australia and Germany and Les Miserables in Norway, Sweden and Greece. He has also been engaged to direct the world premiere of a new musical by Don Black.