Agata Stanford
AGATA PUCCIO STANFORD trained as an actress, singer and dancer, beginning with her attendance at the prestigious High School of Performing Arts in New York City. She continued her studies with Bobby Lewis and William Hickey; musical comedy with Merv Nelson, and dance with Tony Award Winning Choreographer, Henry La Tang. A past member of Actors Equity and Screen Actors Guild, Agata co-founded The Nucleus Theatre on West 54th Street in NYC. There, she acted in/or directed 14 Equity productions. Agata has performed on tour, on and Off-Broadway, as a nightclub performer in New York and resort clubs and appeared in more than fifty films and 30 stage plays. Retiring to raise a family, Agata returned to theatre in 1990 when she and friends formed non-profit Original Works Repertory Theatre in the Saratoga & Lake George region of upstate New York, at The Playhouse at Goose Crossing, presenting new and classic works for the stage. She has written seven plays and two musicals. She is currently at work on the fifth novel of her original Dorothy Parker Mystery Series.
“As a student at The High School of the Performing Arts, when it was located on 46th Street, I’d often walk by The Algonquin Hotel. I was fascinated with the stories of the famous Round Table luncheons and its eclectic membership, from Harpo to Heifetz. As a person of the Theatre, I’d read countless theatrical biographies over the past 40 years, many about the lives of Round Tablers. After awhile I felt I knew so many of them, not so much as figures from the past, but as living friends. Now, in telling my stories of mystery and murder, I have employed the art of witty conversation, as I imagine my main characters would have demanded of me, had I been asked to lunch. The action is set against the exciting background of the times in which they lived – the greatest period in American Theatre and literature, when New York City had twelve daily newspapers, Prohibition was a dirty word, and the Jazz Age unleashed a new kind of music and art. “