About Flasch
Andrew Flasch (b. 1997) is an award-winning theatre music and vocal director, keyboardist, composer, arranger, and music educator.
Flasch began composing music for the theatre in high school, writing original underscoring for a trio of plays at Chicago Street Theatre in Valparaiso: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Rabbit Hole, and Romeo and Juliet. It was here that he began to develop his passion for telling stories with music - analyzing scripts for themes and creating musical motifs for them to heighten a scene’s emotional resonance.
Composing for plays soon turned into being a rehearsal pianist for musicals, and then his first pit performance on keyboard in Memorial Opera House’s Les Misérables. After a brief stint studying composition at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University under Don Freund, Flasch returned to Northwest Indiana to study actuarial science at Valparaiso University, filling his free time with music and vocal directing (MD/VD) for musical theatre.
At 19, his first MD/VD gig was for Crown Point Community Theatre’s Little Shop of Horrors. He would go on to be nominated for Best Musical Direction and win for Best Vocal Direction for his work on this show, while the show itself won Best Musical at the 2017 Northwest Indiana Excellence in Theatre (NIETF) Award Gala.
In 2017, Flasch lead the Valparaiso University Chorale as President to Germany to perform at the Castle Church in Wittenberg and Bach’s St. Thomas Church in Leipzig for the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. The Valparaiso University Chorale was the only international choir invited to perform at the Reformation services. In addition to singing in the bass section and accompanying on the Chorale’s tours, Flasch was commissioned to arrange two pieces that the Chorale would perform. The first, a vocal jazz arrangement of the African-American spiritual Go Tell It on the Mountain, and second, and a medley of tunes from West Side Story for choir and four-hand piano. He graduated from Valparaiso University with a B.S. in Actuarial Science in 2018.
Andrew performs in the Valparaiso University Chorale at Bach’s St. Thomas Church on the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.
Since 2019, Flasch has served as the Music Director for Dunes Arts Foundation’s “Dunes Summer Theatre”, collaborating with former Goodman Theatre Producer Steve Scott on productions including The Bridges of Madison County, Next to Normal, annual cabarets, and Working (2012), a collaboration the Chicago Tribune would hail as “polished”. Flasch’s work at the Dunes was the subject of a feature article, “The Man Behind the Music” (see link below).
In 2020, he provided musical arrangements for an original children’s musical Critters - A Chatsical of Epidemic Proportions in collaboration with Kristyn Estes at the St. Thomas Moore School.
In 2023, Flasch accepted a staff position as Music Director, Accompanist, Arranger at Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Utah. Outside of higher education, he also teaches music as a private instructor.
Flasch recently wrote the book, music, and lyrics for an original musical entitled The Baby with the Bathwater, which he plans to workshop soon!