erichkaroly

Professional musician.
Leading roles in over 200 shorts over the last decade.

BIO 2018

Erich Rausch has worked on over 500 productions as a composer, arranger, music director, director, stage manager and actor. He is a recipient of the Rising Star Award from Paper Mill Playhouse for music direction of Once on This Island, and was music director for the NY premieres of Brecht's The Roundheads and the Pointheads and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. He received excellent notices in Newsday, The Village Voice, and The New York Times for productions of A Chorus Line, My Fair Lady, and original music for Beaumarchais's The Barber of Seville. Revues include the Everly Brothers’ Dream!Dream!Dream! at the Claridge in Atlantic City, the Carpenters’ Close to You, and a Lorenz Hart show. In 2016-17 he music directed Spring Awakening and Pippin at Johns Hopkins University, Burt and Me (the music of Burt Bacharach) at the Meadowbrook Theatre in Michigan, and the East Coast premiere of the Chinese classic Romance of the Western Chamber.



Internationally he has worked at MusicTheater Bavaria in Germany as a coach to young adults preparing for careers in American musical theater and opera, and in Russia as a film actor.


Erich Rausch has played leading roles in dozens of award-winning films on the festival circuit over the last several years. In 2018, he shot his 6th film with Mikhail Saburov on location in Ekaterinburg, Russia. At Cannes 2016 he was represented by (Mike) Saburov’s sci-fi thriller Remember Us (now on Amazon Prime), a pilot for the dystopian-comic series Everything’s OK, and the short Dinner and a Movie. Dinner...shortlisted for an award by Danny Boyle for the Shuffle Festival, and the recipient of the Chaplin Award at the Blow-Up International Arthouse Film Festival in Chicago. You can also hear him as the evil overlord of the planet Marradia on the podcast Mad Max and the Marridians by Gary Morgenstein. In 2017, Gary and Erich began writing a musical version, and Mad Max Saves the World had its sold-out premiere at the Midtown International Festival last fall.


Erich has accompanied master classes for professionals from all areas of the industry, including casting director Mark Simon, Tony Award winner Helen Gallagher, and Broadway conductor Kim Grigsby. He has performed solo jazz at the Lenox Lounge in Harlem, and with Sticks Evans and Melvin Greenwich at Citicorp, and performed with singers from Broadway, the West End, the Met, and City Opera, including Paul Arden-Griffith, Andre Solomon-Glover, Philip Creech and Lauren Flanigan. He accompanied the baritone Abraham Lind- Oquendo at Carnegie Hall for a tribute to the late Raul Davila, and was commissioned by Boricua College for an arrangement and orchestration of the danza Perla Del Caribe, with its premiere at the college’s 25th Anniversary Concert at Symphony Space.

Erich has taught acting, singing and instrumental music at many institutions including West Side Dance/City Music School, the Puerto-Rican Travelling Theatre and HB Studio. He was the music director and composer with City Lights for the Standing Tall Project, creating with 5th grade witnesses to the September 11th disaster a play with music. He created the first vocal classes for pre-teens at The Lee Strasberg Institute, where he studied directing and acting with George Loros and Paul Calderon. He is a student of Karen Leslie-Lyttle, a protégé of Uta Hagen and Stella Adler.

Erich was accepted into The Mannes College of Music for clarinet studies, and into The
Manhattan School of Music as a theory major. He studies conducting and composition with Katherine Hoover. He was the last student to live and study piano with Isabelle Sant'
Ambrogio, herself a student of Alexander Siloti, student of Listz. He was the last
student trained to teach singing by Henry Rosenblatt, son of the famed cantor Yosselle
Rosenblatt, and a protégé of Herbert Caesari. And he was the last acting student of the Karen Leslie-Lyttle, and after her passing went to work with Alice Spivak.

Erich began his career as an intern for the late Rosetta LeNoire at Amas Theater, as a pianist
for the late Titus Walker at Ujamaa Black Theater, and as a composer via the NYC Summer Youth Employment Program for The East Harlem Music School where also he studied percussion, dance, jazz with the Charlie Palmieri, and poetry with the Rumanian writer Mihai Eres. He later worked for Johnny Colon’s EHMS, teaching piano, violin, music theory and acting, and representing the school at early community meetings for the Harlem Empowerment Zone Initiative. With Titus Walker he music directed the premieres of early anti-apartheid plays, bringing an invitation to the United Nations, and a musical biography of Malcom X, performed for the late Betty Shabazz. At the Fantasy Playhouse he premiered Barbara Schaap's first operetta, Beauty and the Beast, covered in The New York Times. He created a pre-teen musical theater program at A.C.T. at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. He has music directed numerous shows at Stagedoor Manor (the theater camp portrayed in the film Camp), and is mentioned in a somewhat embarrassing episode in the new book ‘Theater Geek’ by Mickey Rapkin.