Not Quite Opera Productions, Inc. is a not-for-profit, 501(c)3 corporation dedicated to the development and production of original musical works for the stage. Our approach to developing new work is audience-focused. In the belief that the proof of a work’s success is in the applause, we provide writers, composers and San Francisco’s unique blend of artistically curious tourists and theatergoers from around the world – and around the Bay – with a downtown meeting place to be the first to experience exciting, challenging and richly nuanced original musical works.

Anne Nygren Doherty – Artistic Director
By age 27, Anne Doherty could say she was an actress, award-winning playwright and songwriter whose works had been performed in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. The Chicago Reader called her  “an actress with appreciable presence” and “a writer with real promise.”  In Los Angeles, her late mentor Bob Merrill – the musical theatre legend who wrote Funny Girl – called her lyric writing“genius.”  But at age 28, her career took a detour when she was stricken with severe rheumatoid arthritis. The next twenty years were a journey to healing in which she learned, as Sutro Tower so wisely puts it in Absolutely San Francisco, that everything is related – that what appear to be curses are actually gifts, and that gifts may be curses in disguise. The journey took her to San Francisco, where she has lived with her husband and two children for 11 years. There, she formed Not Quite Opera productions in order to develop new works for musical theatre – both her own and those of local writers. For the past several years, she has made Absolutely San Francisco a labor of love.

John Doherty – Producer/Handyman
Over the last way too many years, John has produced, directed and worked as jack-of-all-trades on hundreds of film, video and multimedia projects around the world. In addition to managing the technical and business affairs for Not Quite Opera, he works full-time as the Senior Media Specialist for FX Palo Alto Research Laboratory (www.fxpal.com) – through which he shares several patents for multimedia technologies – and teaches Motion Picture/Video Lighting at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Not Quite Opera and the Alcove Theater represent another step in the long road he has taken to be close to musicals and the idealized “Show Business” he saw depicted in “Singin’ in the Rain” on TV in the 60′s. In his copious free time, he tries to catch up on sleep.