Michael Mayer (born June 27, 1960) is an American stage and film director. He won the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical in 2007 for directing Spring Awakening.

Biography

Mayer was born in Bethesda, Maryland to Jerry and Louise Mayer. For his bar mitvah in 1973 he asked his parents for a movie camera and received a Super 8 single lens with a zoom. His first film was a dramatization of "The Night the Lights Went out in Georgia." After graduating from Charles W. Woodward High School, he studied acting at New York University's Graduate Acting Program at the Tisch School of the Arts, where he earned an MFA in Theater in 1983.
He began performing onstage in New York City but by 1990 had turned his efforts to directing, working as a freelancer while also teaching at NYU, the Lincoln Center Theater Institute, and the Juilliard School.




Broadway
In 2007, Mayer won his first Tony Award for his direction of the musical adaptation of Spring Awakening (2006), which also took the award for Best Musical. He was nominated for the 2002 Tony for his direction of Thoroughly Modern Millie, which he then directed on London's West End. Mayer also won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Director of a Musical for both Spring Awakening and Thoroughly Modern Millie.

Other Broadway credits include The Lion in Winter (1999), the 1999 revival of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Side Man (1998; Drama Desk Award), the 1998 Tony Award-winning revival of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge starring Anthony LaPaglia and Brittany Murphy, for which he was nominated for a Tony and won the Drama Desk Award, and Triumph of Love, the musical starring Betty Buckley, Susan Egan and F. Murray Abraham, with music by Jeffrey Stock and lyrics by Susan Bikenhead. He worked on American Idiot the musical, based on Green Day's 2004 album American Idiot and the 2011 revival of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever starring Harry Connick, Jr.. He is currently directing the first Broadway production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which opened in 2014.


Off-Broadway
Mayer's off-Broadway directing credits include The Credeaux Canvas, John C. Russell's Stupid Kids, Peter Hedges' Baby Anger, Theresa Rebeck's View of the Dome, and the New York premiere of Janusz Glowacki's Antigone in New York.


Film and television
After directing on- and off-Broadway for more than 15 years, Mayer made his feature film directorial debut with A Home at the End of the World, starring Colin Farrell and Robin Wright Penn, in 2004. He went on to make the family film Flicka (2006), an adaptation of the story My Friend Flicka, which became a hit in DVD market. In 2013 and 2014 he directed selected episodes of Amazon's "Alpha House" starring John Goodman. In 2015, he directed a new film adaptation of The Seagull, starring Annette Bening, Corey Stoll, Mare Winningham, Saoirse Ronan, Brian Dennehy, etc.

He directed the pilot of NBC's TV series Smash.

He should not be confused with the identically spelled Michael Mayer, who directed a sleeper titled Graduation (2007), which is available through Netflix's instant programming. (IMDb correctly has this film's direction attributed to a different Michael Mayer.)


Opera
He made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 2012 with Rigoletto. He reset the scene from 16th-century Mantua to 1960s Las Vegas.