Off Broadway credits include Patrick Barlow’s adaptation of A Christmas Carol (Drama Desk nomination Best Director), the world premieres of Boy and In Transit (Drama Desk nomination Best Director), at Primary Stages, The Burnt Part Boys and Floyd and Clea Under the Western Sky at Playwrights Horizons, the world premieres of The Summer of the Swans and Sarah, Plain and Tall at the Lucille Lortel, the world premiere of The Mistress Cycle for The New York Musical Theatre Festival, the world premiere of Fugitive Songs (Drama Desk Award for Best Musical Revue), and the first New York revival of Bury the Dead and The Memory Show for The Transport Group. He is the adaptor/director of Shakespeare’s R&J, which ran for a year Off-Broadway and earned him a Lucille Lortel Award. He also directed the play’s premieres in Chicago (5 Jeff Award nominations including Best Play and Best Director), Washington, D.C. (Helen Hayes Award nominations for Best Play and Best Director), London (Evening Standard Award honorable mention Best Director) and Tokyo.Regionally Joe has won Best Director Barrymore Awards for both Ordinary Days at 11th Hour Theatre Company and The Light in the Piazza at Philadelphia Theatre Company, which garnered a further 6 awards including Best Musical. Other shows at PTC include The Last Five Years (Barrymore Award Best Musical), Elegies (Barrymore nomination Best Director and Best Musical), and M. Butterfly.At Signature Theatre in Arlington Virginia, he has directed Assassins (Helen Hayes Award Best Director), the world premiere of Nijinsky’s Last Dance (Helen Hayes Awards for Best Director and Best Play), Side Show (Helen Hayes Awards for Best Director and Best Musical), Urinetown (8 Helen Hayes Awards including Best Director and Best Musical), Gypsy (Helen Hayes nominations for Best Director and Best Musical), Elegies: a song cycle (Helen Hayes nomination Best Musical), God of Carnage, Jesus Christ
Superstar, The Flick, John, The Scottsboro Boys, the world premiere of Nest,
the world premiere of The Boy Detective Fails, the world premiere of the musical Cake Off, the world premiere of the play The Gulf, and the world premieres of his own plays Walter Cronkite is Dead and In The Absence of Spring which premiered in New York as the inaugural production of Second Stage’s New Plays Uptown series under his own direction.Other regional work includesthe world premiere of Lincolnesque and The Glass Menagerie at the Old Globe, the world premieres of the musical The Burnt Part Boys, The Memory Show, and The Mysteries of Harris Burdick (also book writer), as well as Kiss Me Kate, Breaking the Code, and Romance in Hard Times, Ragtime, A Dollshouse Part 2 , and Into The Woods, at Barrington Stage Company where he is an Associate Artist, The Circus in Winter and LMNOP at Goodspeed, the world premiere of Short Order Stories for Charter Theatre in Virginia, the world premiere of The Religion Thing at Theater J in Washington DC, his adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at The Shakespeare Theatre Company in D.C, and Of Mice and Men and My Fair Lady at the Hangar Theatre. At the O’Neill Musical Theatre Conference he has directed Broadcast, The Toymaker, Sarah Plain and Tall, In Transit, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and The Shadow Sparrow. He directed Sam I Was as part of the Yale Institute For Musical Theater. He directed Sweeney Todd for Carnegie Mellon University. He directed Twice Charmed: an original twist on the Cinderella story for Disney Creative Entertainment, and his reworking of Ring of Fire: the music of Johnny Cash toured the U.S for over a year.