VAN KAPLAN  (Producer/Director) is the Tony Nominated, Award Winning Consulting Producer/Executive Producer Emeritus of Pittsburgh CLO. He produced or co-produced the Broadway productions of An American in Paris, American Son, The Lifespan of a Fact, On Your Feet!, Farinelli and the King with Mark Rylance, The Elephant Man with Bradley Cooper,  Evita with Ricky Martin, Catch Me If You Can, Twyla Tharp's Come Fly Away, The Addams Family, The Piano Lesson with Samuel L. Jackson, Mr. Saturday Night and American Buffalo. He has produced touring productions of Disney's The Little Mermaid, Camelot, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Phantom, Singin’ in the Rain, Chess, Grand Hotel, City of Angels, Evita, Brigadoon and Nunsense II. His directorial credits include Guys and Dolls with Victoria Clark, She Loves Me, West Side Story with Max Von Essen and Ali Ewoldt, Kopit & Yeston’s Phantom, On the Town, Sweeney Todd with Candy Buckley, South Pacific with Cathy Rigby, Nunsense, Boeing Boeing, Shear Madness, Ruthless!, and Guys and Dolls with Georgia Engel.  He co-founded and directs The Jimmy Awards on Broadway each year at the Minskoff Theatre and has directed original shows for Caesars Entertainment at the Rio, Paris and Bally’s Hotels in Las Vegas. He has consulted for the National Endowment for the Arts, is a former Theatre Panel chair for the Texas Commission on the Arts, and has served as adjunct professor for Carnegie Mellon’s Masters of Arts Management Program. He is a member of the Board of Governors of The Broadway League, serves on the Investment Committee of the Independent Presenters Network (IPN) and is past president of The National Alliance for Musical Theatre (NAMT). He is a lifetime Tony Awards® voter.