How I Got Here
Doug Kreeger is an actor, singer, director, and writer whose three-decade career spans Broadway, Off-Broadway, national and international tours, and concert performance at Carnegie Hall and Walt Disney Concert Hall. He is drawn to performance that alters the room, where attention sharpens, stillness becomes charged, and audience and story occupy the same breath. His work often invites spectators into an expanded present, where time seems to slow or stretch and emotional recognition becomes shared rather than private.
As his craft and career developed, Doug moved beyond romantic leads and toward characters who hold contradiction, shame, desire, and danger in the same breath, establishing a specialization in antagonists and antiheroes. Through a combination of precise vocal storytelling, somatic awareness, and unguarded presence, he creates performances in which audiences often recognize aspects of themselves they did not expect to encounter.
On Broadway, Doug played Jean Prouvaire in Les Misérables. Off-Broadway, he originated the roles of Ian in Rooms: A Rock Romance (New World Stages) and Richard Loeb in Thrill Me: The Leopold & Loeb Story (York Theatre), a show that has since been produced worldwide over 200 times, including London’s West End and a long-running version in South Korea. Doug also starred as Jordan in Departure Lounge (The Public Theater) and appeared in Yank! and Judas & Me at the New York Musical Theatre Festival. Regionally, he has worked with Signature Theatre (alongside Chita Rivera in Kander & Ebb's The Visit and later in Brother Russia), Yale Repertory Theatre, Pittsburgh CLO (Jesus Christ Superstar), the Old Globe, and others. Internationally, he toured as Danny Zuko in Grease and as Berger in Hair.
Doug made his Carnegie Hall debut as Ignis in Eric Whitacre's opera Paradise Lost: Shadows & Wings and later performed the work at Walt Disney Concert Hall and Chicago's Roosevelt Auditorium Theatre. His collaborators across theatre and concert performance include John Kander, Chita Rivera, Ann Reinking, Lea Salonga, Michael Arden, Adam Lambert, Trevor Nunn, and John Caird. He appears on multiple original cast recordings and is a two-time Helen Hayes Award nominee, Ovation Award nominee, and two-time Po‘okela Award winner.
Born and raised in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, Doug grew up in a cultural environment attuned to ritual, embodiment, and the shared experience of being in community, sensibilities that continue to shape his artmaking. As a queer artist, he gravitates toward material that holds contradiction and complexity, where shame, desire, and catharsis coexist.
Based in Los Angeles, Doug is a longtime company member of For The Record Live, appearing in Scorsese: American Crime Requiem and Love Actually Live at the Wallis Annenberg Center, and later serving as the company's Associate Director and Production Stage Manager. His directing and dramaturgical work includes projects at Center Staging, Altadena Music Theatre, Diamond Head Theatre, Highways Performance Space, and Loyola Marymount University, as well as ongoing collaborations on new and immersive musicals.
Alongside his creative practice, Doug writes about musical theatre and performance for academic and interdisciplinary audiences. His work has appeared in Studies in Musical Theatre Journal and Ecumenica Journal, where he examines musical theatre as a site of cultural, aesthetic, and spiritual inquiry. Doug is a frequent topic of conversation in the best-selling book Thrill Maker: The Story of My Musical THRILL ME by Stephen Dolginoff.
Doug holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, studied Shakespeare performance at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and earned his Master of Fine Arts in Performance Pedagogy from Loyola Marymount University. He is a proud member of Actors' Equity Association, Musical Theatre Educators' Alliance, and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.