Tesori saw her first Off-Broadway production, Godspell at the Promenade, when she was fourteen. She said of the experience that she felt the sense of "I'm someplace where there's something happening, and I don't want to be anywhere else."[4]
Tesori began her career as the substitute assistant conductor for the 1989 production of Gypsy. Tesori made her credited Broadway debut as the dance arranger, associate conductor and keyboard player for The Secret Garden in 1991. Soon after, she was the associate conductor and played keyboard for the original production of The Who's Tommy, working with frequent collaborator, Des McAnuff. Tesori eventually music directed the German production of the musical, which she says gave her the courage to continue music directing. Tesori says she drew from her experience working on Tommy while writing Fun Home, and that it gave her the idea for how to bring her protagonist into her own story.[8] She arranged the dance music for the 1995 revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Tesori worked as an arranger on the musical revue Dream when she became pregnant with her first child. While pregnant, Tesori also did the incidental music arrangements and dance arrangements for the 1998 production of The Sound of Music. Tesori struggled with the fact that she "worked so hard to hide the fact that (she) had a uterus", and was then arriving to rehearsals pregnant.
Tesori was asked to write the score for the 1998 production of Twelfth Night after being introduced to Nicholas Hytner by Ira Weitzman. Hytner heard her score for Violet and she asked her to write 60 minutes of music for the production, with 3 months to complete the score. Despite scores for plays not typically being nominated for best score at the Tony Awards, Thomas Cott ensured that people considered it, and Tesori was nominated in 1999. Next, Tesori wrote the arrangements for Swing![8]
Tesori has collaborated with Tony Kushner four times. In 2004 she supplied music for the sung-through musical Caroline, or Change, which garnered her a third Tony nomination for Best Original Score. In 2006 she wrote incidental music for Kushner's new translation of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, which was produced as part of the 2006 Shakespeare in the Park season staged at the Delacorte Theater by The Public Theater.[10] In the summer of 2011, their opera A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck premiered at Glimmerglass. In 2019, Tesori was credited as voice coach on the new Steven Spielberg film of West Side Story for which Kushner wrote the screenplay based largely on the original stage musical. Filmed over two months in and around New York City, the film saw its 2020 release rescheduled to December 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tesori wrote the music for Shrek The Musical, which opened on Broadway in 2008 and for which she earned both Tony and Drama Desk Award nominations for her music.[11]
In 2011, she wrote the music to Fun Home with a book and lyrics by Lisa Kron, a musical based on the memoir by Alison Bechdel. The show was overseen by Philip Himberg while being workshopped at the Sundance Institute's 2011 Theatre Lab at White Oaks Lab in Yulee, Florida. It was previously developed during the 2009 Ojai Playwrights Conference.[12]Fun Home opened Off-Broadway at The Public Theater on October 17, 2013, and sold out through November 4, 2013, with numerous extensions until it closed there on January 12, 2014.[13] Here, it also won the 2014 Obie Award for Musical Theatre.[14] Following the successful Off-Broadway run, the show transferred to Broadway at Circle in the Square Theatre, with previews beginning on March 27, 2015, and an official opening on April 19, 2015. Tesori and Kron won Tony Awards for Best Musical and Best Original Score for Fun Home, marking the first time an all-female composing team won either category. The musical was named a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama finalist.[15]
The English version of three songs in the 2016 Tokyo DisneySea stage show Out of Shadowland were written by Tesori. They were sung in Japanese by pop singer Angela Aki.[20]
With book and lyrics by David Henry Hwang, Tesori's new musical Soft Power began performances at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles in May 2018 and at San Francisco's Curran Theatre in June.[21] The musical opened Off-Broadway at the Public Theater on September 14, 2019, directed by Leigh Silverman.[22] The musical was named a 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama finalist.[23]
In October 2023, Tesori's new opera Grounded opened at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC.[27][28] The Kennedy Center's publicity summarizes the opera as "Jess is a hot shot F-16 fighter pilot, an elite warrior trained for the sky. When an unexpected pregnancy grounds her, she’s reassigned to the “chair force” to control drones in Afghanistan from the comfort of a trailer in Las Vegas. Mezzo-soprano Emily D'Angelo stars as a pilot and mother shaken into a downward spiral as her separation between career and home crumbles. What price is inflicted upon the operator of a lone drone in a blue sky?" The libretto is by George Brant, based on his play. The premier is a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera who originally commissioned the piece, and it will start their 2024–2025 season.
Personal life
She lives with her child, Siena, in Manhattan. Tesori is divorced from Siena’s father, Michael Rafter, an arranger and conductor.[5]
