Allen Barton (born May 18, 1968) is an American writer/director, acting teacher, classical pianist, and political host/commentator. He is known primarily for his longtime association with the Beverly Hills Playhouse, the renowned Los Angeles-based acting school, and for his work on the Pajamas Media online political channel PJTV, where he is host of The Front Page[1]. His older brother is Fred Barton, the New York-based pianist, composer, orchestrator, and co-creator of Forbidden Broadway.
Allen Barton grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts and has a B.A. from Harvard University, where he studied Russian & Soviet Studies, and was a VP for the Hasty Pudding Theatricals. After graduation, he relocated to Los Angeles and began his studies as an actor at the Beverly Hills Playhouse. Over the next 20 years, he served exhaustive apprenticeships as a director and teacher under Milton Katselas, the famous teacher and BHP's founder. Simultaneously with his artistic training, he began working part time for the BHP in 1993, rapidly ascending to become CFO in 1997 and then the school's youngest ever CEO in 2003. He began teaching for BHP in 2002, had a class under his own name in 2005, and taught alongside Katselas in the Advanced program starting in 2007 up until Katselas' death in October 2008. Katselas bequeathed majority ownership to Barton, who still teaches the Advanced classes at the school. He has overseen the BHP's expansion to both New York and San Francisco.
As a director, he has helmed the following Los Angeles stage productions: About Faith (2001), Pink Dot (2005), Burn This (2006), The Last Five Years (2007), Baja Fresh (2008), Rabbit Hole (2008), The Real Thing [2] (2009), and the world premiere of his own script Engagement [3][4] (2010).
As a classical pianist, Barton studied with Seth Kimmelman at New England Conservatory, and in Los Angeles with Bernardo Segall, Deborah Aitken and Mario Feninger. He was a prize-winner in the 2002 Los Angeles Liszt Society Competition, and has performed annual recitals in Los Angeles, New York, Boston and the New England area. He has recorded five compact discs, Debut Recital, 2, 3, 4, and 5, all available at cdbaby.com, the iTunes store, and various other online distribution outlets. In 2010 he was made a Steinway Artist.[5].
Finally, in 2008 he was hired by the upstart online political channel PJTV, Pajamas Media's high definition, subscription-based Internet television service. The Internet TV "channel" debuted at the 2008 Republican convention, where PJTV had a broadcasting booth inside of Minneapolis’s Xcel Energy Center, which housed the convention. Since then, the online TV service has featured interviews with former GOP senator Fred Thompson, former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, and numerous pundits and authors.
PJTV has several satellite studios including a facility inside the Washington DC offices of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The satellite facilities transmit high definition video via broadband to main PJTV studio in Los Angeles. There, several Pajamas Media affiliated bloggers do double-duty as show hosts and on-air pundits. Barton hosts The Front Page, a weekly collection of interviews with commentators from Investors Business Daily, the Ayn Rand Institute, as well as experts on politics, polling, economics and culture. In 2010 he interviewed Congressman Tom McClintock regarding the upcoming 2010 midterm elections and the state of the Obama presidency.
Barton married Tiffany Yu in 2003, and they have two children.
In the mid-late 1990s, Barton was associated with Scientology[6], and acted in many of their in-house films under the Golden Era Productions banner. His last course completion was in 2000, and he appears to have had no activity with the group since then [7].