Meet the people
behind the plays.
Bob Gribas & Angela Rinaldi-Gribas
A partnership of storytelling, original music, and hands-on theater-making. Since 1995, Bob and Angela have helped young people and adults turn familiar tales into shared adventures.
Since 1995
Creating theater together at Variety Plus
30+
Original musical adaptations in the company’s history
250+
Songs Angela has composed for theater and dance
Bob Gribas
Artistic Director / Writer / Director / Technical Designer
Bob brings more than four decades of theater experience to the work: writing, directing, designing, performing, teaching, and making the imaginative practical. His background spans technical theater, elementary education, and scenic design.
His touring experience has taken him through the United States and Canada with companies including Prairie Fire Children’s Theatre, Small Change Theatre, and One Reel. In the Seattle area, he has led workshops and residencies with organizations including Youth Theatre Northwest, The Evergreen School, and Spectrum Dance Theater.
He is also a prolific mask-maker. Spectrum’s biography credits him with thousands of masks for hundreds of shows. That combination of storytelling and stagecraft is part of what makes his work distinctive: he understands not only how a story reads, but how people bring it to life.
Angela Rinaldi-Gribas
Managing Director / Composer / Music Director / Choreographer
Angela brings the music, movement, and experience of a lifelong teaching artist. Trained in dance at Cornish, she has composed more than 250 songs for theater and dance productions, alongside professional work as a singer, actor, accompanist, and choreographer.
Her published credits include dance-music work with Spectrum Dance Theater, Cornish College of the Arts, and Pacific Northwest Ballet, and teaching-artist work with Seattle Children’s Theatre. She has also served as music director and choreographer for school musical productions.
Her work has traveled with young performers, too: she performed with Bellevue High School students at the American High School Theatre Festival in Edinburgh in 2013 and 2017. Across those settings, her experience connects original composition with the practical work of helping a cast find its musical voice.
A stage with room for everyone.
Variety Plus was built around a simple, generous idea: young people and adults can make meaningful theater together. Its multi-generational ensembles put creativity, confidence, diversity, and mutual respect at the center of the experience.
Stories that invite people in.
Classic tales give a company a shared starting point. Original writing and music give those familiar worlds a new theatrical life.
Craft that meets the rehearsal room.
Bob and Angela’s backgrounds in directing, teaching, composing, dance, and design bring many sides of the production process into the same conversation.
From the Variety Plus community.
Genuine excerpts from testimonials published by Variety Plus Theater. Read the full stories on the original reviews page.
Bob and Angela are creative power houses and are absolutely fitted in temperament and talent to this joyous company.
Jeremy January
Variety Plus performer; Captain Hook in 2008
They are professionals with huge imagination, talent and heart.
Michelle Beaumont
Published Variety Plus testimonial
This was my first participation in a real stage production, and I have loved it and learned so much from it.
Michael Kischner
First-time stage participant
Thank you for your work, your love of theater, and the amazing gift you give your community every year.
David Kline
Credited as a drama teacher at Bellevue High School
An archived press mention
The Seattle Times included Variety Plus’s Peter Pan in its Weekend calendar, describing it as an original musical adaptation of the James M. Barrie story at the Museum of History & Industry.
This is an event listing, not a critical review or an endorsement.
Bring your company into the story.
Tell us about your cast, your venue, and the musical that caught your imagination. Start with a conversation at info@varietyplus.org.
Read the published biographies
This page draws on the founders’ published professional biographies and the company’s history. Photographs are from the Variety Plus website.