Dedication: Judy Levitt

A lot of us here at Theatre of NOTE call our ensemble “Mama NOTE.” If ever Mama NOTE had her own mama, she was Judy Levitt—Judith Ann Levitt, in all our official literature. We lost Judy in December of 2022, and NOTE will never be the same.

Playgoers who have attended NOTE’s productions with any regularity will know Judy from her stellar acting work over the decades. Joining the ensemble when it was still young, Judy played well over twenty main stage roles here, and pretty much knocked it out of the park every time.

Her first appearance at NOTE was in our 1986 evening Public Moments, in a short play called The Secret Life of Lily Langtry, written and directed by her husband, Walter Koenig. Judy also wrote and directed two of the other plays in that evening, one of them featuring her daughter Danielle. Fans of our longest-running show, A Mulholland Christmas Carol, will remember her as the nurse from the orphanage at the dam dedication ceremony during the first four years the show ran at NOTE.

She only had one scene in 2004’s Red Light Green Light, but her heartrending delivery of her speech as a concerned mother to her gay son – brilliantly written by Erik Patterson and delivered with such intelligence and passion by Judy –  is for many who saw it not only the most indelible memory of that production, but one of the great moments in Los Angeles theatre.

In 2014, Judy appeared in another play by Erik Patterson, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, this time playing a brain trauma survivor, somehow managing to break our hearts and make us laugh all at once.

Her last NOTE main stage appearance was in 2016’s A Beautiful Day in November on the Banks of the Greatest of the Great Lakes, by Kate Benson. It was especially appropriate, as she played the matriarch of a large family, much like the role she played in our ensemble.

And of course, for years and years we all looked forward to the annual Hollywood Performance Marathon, when we would get to see Judy portraying Dorothy Parker, a role she seemed born to play.

She also seemed born to take care of her NOTE family. Many of us have stories of Judy checking in on us to ask what she could do, when she suspected we were in need of some care. Most of us have been to Judy and Walter’s house repeatedly—she never tired of hosting play readings and feeding us while we were there. She never tired of promoting the art of theatre; earlier in 2022 she alerted us all that it was the 400th anniversary of the birth of Molière.

She never tired of advancing humanitarian causes. She never tired of fighting for civil rights. She never tired of anything. Like a mama. We, her chicadees, as she loved to call us, will move forward without Judy, but it’s going to take all of us to generate the energy she brought to the ensemble, to theatre, to the world in general. We will try to make the world glow as brightly as you did, Judy.

Thank you for lighting the way.