Amanda Stutzman (2012)

Amanda Stutzman attributes her love of New York City to her love of staying busy.

To her, the city is like one of the many Broadway shows she works, running close to 35 backstage costume changes per show.

“For two hours I don’t stop and I just feel like the city is that way all the time,” she says.

Amanda started working on Broadway shows in New York in the fall of 2021, but she started preparing for this role when she was a seventh grader at James Madison Preparatory School.

Growing up, Amanda and her family attended the theater often.

“I loved the theater world but did not like being on stage at all,” Amanda says. “Our birthday gifts were going to shows or season subscriptions to local theaters. I was always surrounded by theater, so theater was a big attraction of JMPS.”

When she arrived at the school and was suddenly surrounded by opportunities to get involved in plays and musicals, Amanda wanted to get involved backstage.

“I don’t remember quite how it happened, but they let me work on Beauty and the Beast and Pride and Prejudice,” Amanda says. “Batch [Mr. Batchelder] was a saint for letting a seventh-grader touch his drama department…I don’t know if I would have let an 11-year-old take over costuming. I don’t even remember asking or how I figured out what to do.”

But figure it out she did.

“That was the start of it and I knew it was not going to be the end of it,” Amanda says. She continued to work backstage throughout her time at JMPS.

In addition to Mr. Batchelder, Amanda credits Ms. Curtis's work in creating a dedicated costume department at JMPS, which Amanda eagerly took part in.

While Amanda reluctantly joined her friends on stage in Guys and Dolls and The Music Man, she thrived in her work backstage.

The path to Broadway

On her senior trip to New York in 2012 Amanda visited New York and “immediately fell in love,” Amanda says. “I [wanted to] move here right after graduation, but I think I needed to get my feet under me first.”

After graduating from JMPS, Amanda earned her B.S. in Genetic Cells & Developmental Biology from Arizona State University. She worked as a backstage dresser in various theaters, always coming back to do JMPS shows.

She had considered majoring in theater but decided she needed something more stable in case theater "was ever not supportive of a full-time lifestyle.” She was grateful for that decision when the Covid pandemic shut down the theater world for 18 months.

In 2016 Amanda joined the staff of JMPS as a middle school teacher. While on faculty she continued to organize costumes and facilitate backstage costume changes. She also worked as a backstage dresser for Broadway and other shows at Phoenix Theater Company and ASU Gammage.

One such show was ¡Americano!. Amanda “dressed” the world premier of the show, which had a record-setting run at Arizona’s Phoenix Theater Company in 2020, just before the Covid pandemic.

“I have a deep love for ¡Americano!,” Amanda says. “It’s all about Arizona too, so it’s reminiscent of home.”

Amanda became indispensable to the show. After a long pause due to the Covid pandemic, Amanda moved to New York in November 2021 to work the Off-Broadway production of ¡Americano!.

“It’s considered an Off-Broadway theater because we only seat 499 audience members, and to be considered a Broadway show you have to seat 500 audience members,” Amanda says.

¡Americano! has 500 costumes, and Amanda manages 100 of them. She executes 35 costume changes per show, mostly with the lead actor.

“We have a choreography of our own [for changes],” Amanda says. (Check out a quick video of one of their back-stage costume changes.)

After its Off-Broadway run, ¡Americano! is closing down for some workshopping “to make sure it is watertight” before hopefully reopening on Broadway.

In the meantime, Amanda is staying busy working on other Broadway shows, including My Fair Lady, a show she first worked at JMPS in 2011 and which she loves to work for its numerous costume changes.

Experience at JMPS as a student and teacher

“I was one of those day-one seventh graders,” Amanda says. She wanted to change schools after elementary school, and JMPS made sense for her because it was on the same street as her house.

She loved the small classes at JMPS, as she describes herself as a quiet person. She also says she valued “the ability to be involved in things without having to be the best. I was not someone who had to get straight A’s. I appreciated the academics, but all the extracurriculars [and close relationships] were most important to me.”

Though she was especially close to Mr. Batchelder and Ms. Curtis due to her involvement in theater, she also feels close to her other teachers.

“I was always a big reader, so Ms. Lambert was always good to be around…and I appreciated Mr. Pond’s jokes,” she says.

One interaction with Mrs. Schilling especially stands out:

“In ninth grade Amy Schilling came up to me and she said ‘you should really consider being a teacher.’ And I looked her straight in the face and said, ‘I will never be a teacher.’ She’ll bring it up to this day because I was so terribly stubborn about the whole thing. I was humbled a couple years later,” Amanda says.

Working at JMPS during the pandemic

In the fall of 2017 JMPS added a sixth grade and Amanda started teaching it. In 2018 Amanda began teaching every subject in sixth grade. Her schedule was packed, as she was also working evenings at Phoenix Theater Company and ASU Gammage.

When Covid hit Amanda suddenly had a lot of time on her hands, and she used it to help JMPS pivot to online learning.

In the summer of 2020 Amanda got Google Educator-certified and ran a teacher training.

Moving to New York and leaving JMPS and teaching behind has been a big change for her.

“I’ve always loved working with kids,” Amanda says. “I may someday come back to teaching.”

But for now, she is deeply in love with her work on Broadway.