In Good Company
They came from opposite ends of the country — Matthew Smith from Sacramento, Hadley Connor from just outside Boston — and both ended up exactly where they needed to be. They're part of the Ray Bolger Musical Theater Program at UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television cohort that arrived in 2022 and became, by all accounts, something rarer than a class. They became a company.
"It's our own little home away from home," Connor said.
They cheered each other on, learned from each other and performed frequently together on UCLA stages. The productions they shared tell the story of a program defined by ambition. For example, "Xanadu" — the campy, exuberant rock musical built around the music of Electric Light Orchestra — evolved into something genuinely new in TFT's hands. The spring 2025 show became an immersive, technology-driven production with AI-generated visuals, 360-degree staging and a live band, and of course, performed partly on roller skates.
Smith played lead Sonny Malone, moving, dancing and rolling around the stage with his cast members, the audience right there, moving through the same spaces, sitting on the same structures, sometimes even dancing along. Giant shrines to the play's cast of muses featured larger-than-life screens peppered with algorithmic artwork created nightly by the audience. These custom plinths shifted periodically to create new stages within the stage.
"It was so different," Smith said. "It completely changed how I understand interacting with an audience, too, and that opened up so many ideas for me, just as an actor and as a storyteller."
Their senior year brought "Emma: No One But Herself," which is a world away from "Xanadu" in both tone and setting. The musical adaptation of Jane Austen's novel, written by Megan Brown, with original music by Sarah Taylor Ellis, had been workshopped around for nearly a decade before UCLA mounted only its second fully produced staging in March 2026.
Connor, cast in the title role, carried the full weight of a character audiences arrive with preconceptions about. As Emma, she was on stage for nearly the entire show. She navigated a Received Pronunciation dialect (the formal accent of the British upper classes) coached by TFT lecturer Mary Claire Garcia, and found the emotional arc underneath the comedy. Music director and head of TFT's musical theater program Dan Belzer was a steady presence throughout.
"I think UCLA theater does a really good job of, like, feeding a fire," Conner said. "Yes, we are getting trained to perform, and it's really fun and we like performing, but they're also training us to understand why we express ourselves in this way, and understand why we pick certain shows, why we send out certain messages. And that fuels our performances."
Smith played George Knightley — stern and honorable, with warmth that reveals itself slowly. It was a memorable experience to work directly with the show's creators, he said, hearing them describe their process and even what they would want to change now, a decade on. Smith also recently appeared in two regional productions, "Frozen" and "Hairspray," the latter alongside Broadway's Tracy Turnblad — Marissa Jaret Winokur.
And in one of the school's memorable moments from the academic year, Smith and fellow senior Maisie McPeek were invited to perform for Carol Burnett during a private campus visit honoring the entertainment icon. Smith and McPeek sang "I'm So Glad We Had This Time Together," the song that closed every episode of her legendary variety show.
Broadway is a shared aspiration for Smith and Connor, as it is for many who come through this program. Smith has also been deepening his study of American Sign Language, drawn to the work of local company Deaf West Theatre and the ways performance can bridge communities.
"You never know who's in the audience," he said, "and what they need to see that night."
