Matthew Lockitt

Matthew Lockitt holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance from Monash University. His dissertation, The Musical Is Drama: Apollonian and Dionysian Dynamics and Liminal Ruptures in the Contemporary Musical Theatre examines the various dynamic interactions that occur between word, music, and movement as dramaturgical agents. His publications include “‘Proposition: To reconsider the non-singing character and the songless moment”, Studies in Musical Theatre (2012), and “‘Love, Let Me Sing You’: The Liminality of Song and Dance in LaChiusa’s Bernarda Alba”, Gestures of Music Theatre: The Performativity of Song and Dance (2014).
Matthew teaches musical theatre history, theory, writing and performance, within the Centre for Theatre and Performance, Monash University. During his time teaching he has worked to develop an immersive pedagogical model through which the students devise, develop, write and stage an original musical across a semester. This is has resulted in productions of Aesop’s Fables (2013), Sticks and Stones (2014), and Metamorphoses (2015). As a director Matthew has directed productions of The King and I, Gypsy, Once on this Island (Australasian premiere), and The Wiz, as well as the plays Wolf Lullaby, Lion in the Streets, Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer, and Pizza Man. Most recently he directed The Songs of Ahrens and Flaherty (Melbourne and Sydney) and The Songs of Alan Menken for Flourish Productions.
Matthew is an advocate for the writing and development of new musical theatre in Australia.