“A voice as towering as the Smoky Mountains”
- Nancy Steele Brokaw for The Pantagraph
Nole Jones is a singer, actor, voice teacher, and stage director originally from Birmingham, Alabama. Nole is currently an MFA candidate in Musical Theatre at San Diego State University, where he teaches courses in voice, musical theatre performance, and music theory. Prior to joining SDSU, he taught for six years on the Music Theatre faculty at Illinois Wesleyan University.
Nole has appeared in musicals with the Moonlight Amphitheatre, Utah Festival Opera & Musical Theatre, Dollywood Entertainment, Music Theatre Works (formerly Light Opera Works), Lyric Theatre Illinois, and Prairie Fire Theatre. He is recently appeared as Hotep in the regional premiere of THE PRINCE OF EGYPT at Moonlight Amphitheater, and Frank Shepard in Steven Sondheim’s MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG. This May, he will perform in Ryan Scott Oliver’s new folk horror musical, TOMORROW THE ISLAND DIES. Other favorite appearances have included BRIGHT STAR (Jimmy Ray), SHE LOVES ME (Georg), JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR (Judas), RENT (Roger), THE SECRET GARDEN (Archibald Craven), and THE 25TH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE (Mitch Mahoney).
Also a regular concert soloist and choral singer, Nole appeared last August in Sondheim Tonight! A Celebration of Genius with the San Diego Symphony at Rady shell, conducted by Broadway legend Rob Fisher and featuring Len Cariou, Emily Skinner, and Tony Yazbeck, and was featured in An Evening on Broadway with Julie and Nathan Gunn at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. He is an inaugural member of Vocal Space, a new professional vocal ensemble based in Asheville, North Carolina, and was a long-time member of the Lake Junaluska Singers, a professional 16-voice ensemble with whom he performed over 250 concerts around the Southeastern U.S.
As a faculty member in the BFA Musical Theatre program at Illinois Wesleyan University’s School of Theatre Arts from 2018 to 2024, Nole taught Musical Theatre Voice, Music Theatre History & Literature, Acting the Song, and Musical Theatre Scene Study. His former students are employed as professional singers and actors in New York, on national tours, and in regional theatres, cruise ships, theme parks around the country. As a voice teacher he specializes in voice pedagogy for musical theatre and contemporary commercial music (CCM) with a focus on voice science and functional training, and his research and scholarship focuses on voice pedagogy for Country and Americana music in musical theatre. Nole has taught musical theatre masterclasses at Auburn University, Nebraska Wesleyan University, and Washburn University, and presented on voice pedagogy at the Musical Theatre Educators Alliance (MTEA) National Conference in NYC.
Nole’s stage directing credits at IWU include Jason Robert Brown’s SONGS FOR A NEW WORLD, [TITLE OF SHOW] in IWU’s Phoenix Theatre, and Music Theatre Senior Showcases in New York City and Chicago. At San Diego State University he created and directed a new adaptation of BIG RIVER inspired by Percival Everett’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, James. His vocal director and assistant musical director credits include CARRIE: THE MUSICAL, HEAD OVER HEELS, and THE LIGHTNING THEIF.
Nole earned a Master of Music degree in Voice Performance and Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was a Stotler Graduate Voice Fellow, and also holds bachelor’s degrees in both Music and Theatre from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He lives in San Diego with his wife, Hannah and his daughter, Tzeitel.