Jessica Stone—who directed last year’s Tony-winning Best Musical, Kimberly Akimbo, and may just have directed this year’s Tony-winning Best Musical, Water for Elephants—first met her husband, actor Christopher Fitzgerald, onstage. This was back in 1999, when there were still babes in arms and rehearsing, appropriately enough, a New York City Center Encores! production of Babes in Arms, the Rodgers and Hart perennial. Specifically, it was while rehearsing a fast-paced, roughhouse rendition of R&H’s “I Wish I Were in Love Again.”

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“It was a very physical number,” Stone tells Observer. “The first day we met, we were kicking each other and beating each other up.” But the result was gang-busters. “When you work hard at something and people appreciate it, you feel pretty great.”

Four years later, they returned to the stage of that triumph, Fitzgerald having lured her there, using the ruse that Encores! musical director, Rob Fisher, wanted to see them. When it became clear Fisher was a no-show, Fitzgerald dropped to one knee and popped the question. She said yes. They now have two sons, 17 and 15, but they travel on quite different showbiz planes.

Not long after Babes in Arms, Stone traded in her dancing shoes and for a director’s megaphone. Fitzgerald remains a clown prince of Broadway—he handled three roles in the recent revival of Spamalot—while Stone toils behind the scenes.

Stone sees her switch from dancing to directing as a natural progression. “I always had a desire to collaborate with other kinds of storytellers, to think about the story in a larger way than just the character that I was playing,” she says.

Nevertheless, she tiptoed into this new profession.........

© Observer