For listeners of a certain generation, you’ll recognize a member of her family. Her cousin, Bill Idelson, was an actor and screenwriter best known for playing Rose Marie’s long-suffering boyfriend Herman Glimscher on The Dick Van Dyke Show, as well as writing for The Twilight Zone, M*A*S*H, Happy Days, and The Andy Griffith Show, among others. (She feels this should be important enough to mean something. It does not. She loves to talk about it anyway.)

 

While her first love is the stage, Emily enjoys working in all performance mediums. She trained in Theatre, Medieval Studies, and Classical Lit at SUNY Purchase (BA); Studio Theatre Acting Conservatory; Shakespeare & Company (Lenox, MA); Shaw Festival (Ontario, CA); and is an ongoing classical/contemporary musical theatre voice student with Dan Thaler in NYC. A proud member of SAG-AFTRA, she made her feature film debut in 2023 in Rustin on Netflix, directed by six-time Tony nominee George C. Wolfe. 

 

Locally, she is a resident company member of the Maryland Renaissance Festival, and often featured as a cabaret soloist at La Ti Do. She also has a YA audiobook, Time to Live: Inheritance of Time, Vol 1, available at Audible.

 

Other recent work includes Songbird at Washington National Opera; Lizzy Bennet Darcy in Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley (Broadwayworld Baltimore nominee: Best Performer in a Streaming Production) with Strand Theatre Company, the UK-based The Show Must Go Online Youtube series (Northumberland, Richard II), and Tabletop Broadway NYC’s virtual cabaret series. DC-area highlights: The Mollusc (Miss Roberts) at Quotidian Theatre Company; In the Next Room or the vibrator play (Catherine) at Silver Spring Stage; The Tempest (Ariel) at WSC Avant Bard; Doubt (Sr. James) at SeeNoSun Onstage; Other Desert Cities (Brooke) at Peace Mountain Theater Company; and The Ferberizing of Coral original cast, Source Festival. Other film: Pen Pals, Silent Sentinel.