Anne Doherty

ANNE DOHERTY – By age 27, Anne Doherty could say she was an actress, award-winning playwright and songwriter whose works had been performed in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. The Chicago Reader called her “an actress with appreciable presence” and “a writer with real promise.” In Los Angeles, her late mentor Bob Merrill – the musical theatre legend who wrote Funny Girl – called her lyric writing “genius.” But at age 28, her career took a detour when she was stricken with severe rheumatoid arthritis. The next twenty years were a journey to healing in which she learned, as Sutro Tower so wisely puts it in Absolutely San Francisco, that “everything is related” – that what appear to be curses are actually gifts, and that gifts may be curses in disguise. The journey took her to San Francisco, where she has lived with her husband and two children for 11 years. There, she formed Not Quite Opera productions in order to develop new works for musical theatre – both her own and those of local writers. For the past several years, she has made Absolutely San Francisco a labor of love.