Actor Writer Director Producer

Jay James-Moody, he wrote humbly in the third-person, is an award-winning actor, director, writer, and producer. He was an original founder of Sydney's prestigious HAYES THEATRE CO and from 2006 - 2023 he was the creator and Artistic Director of acclaimed boutique company SQUABBALOGIC - one of Australia’s premier producers of intimate musical theatre. Squabbalogic provided a stage for Australia’s finest emerging and established artists to present exciting and dynamic lesser-seen or reimagined music theatre works.

Squabbalogic filled a void by connecting with challenging work and writers in musical theatre often neglected by mainstream companies and sharing it with an audience eager to experience an alternative to large-scale spectacles. Jay's pioneering work with Squabbalogic led to his later establishing of Hayes Theatre Co with like-minded theatre makers, which in turn directly resulted in the last decade of exciting new independent music theatre in Sydney.

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Jay was the recipient of a 2022 Mike Walsh Fellowship for producing, the 2024 Australian Writer's Guild Award for Music Theatre, and the 2024 David Williamson Prize.

Jay has collaborated on theatrical works with such diverse organisations as NIDA, WAAPA, AIM, Kings Cross Theatre, Opera Australia, Merrigong Theatre Company, Sydney Theatre Company, New Mardi Gras, Darlinghurst Theatre Company, the Seymour Centre, Sydney Opera House, Noosa Long Weekend, Royal Caribbean Cruises, City of Sydney, New Musicals Australia, the Sydney Fringe Festival, and Sydney Philharmonia Choirs.

Jay wrote Straight From The Hart, a solo work for Blake Bowden; The Day of the Triffids, adapted for the stage from John Wyndham’s novel; co-wrote the book of a musical adaptation of the best-selling fantasy Good Omens (with Vicki Larnach and Jim Hare); and co-wrote Caught Out, an original musical satire based on the Australian cricket team cheating scandal, co-written with Xavier Coy and Lloyd Allison-Young. He also revised and adapted Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane’s On A Clear Day You Can See Forever. Jay is presently working on several new written works for stage and screen.

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Key credits include Squabbalogic’s On A Clear Day You Can See Forever; Ensemble’s A Christmas Carol; his sell-out, one-man tour-de-force musical Herringbone; Hayes Theatre Co’s She Loves Me; West Side Story for Opera Australia’s Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour; and was the first Australian Elder Cunningham in the original Melbourne cast of The Book of Mormon.

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Additional performance credits include Enron and God (Mill Theatre); Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night and Romeo & Juliet (Sport for Jove); A Midsummer Nights Dream and A Cheery Soul (STC); Nine, Of Thee I Sing, Man Of La Mancha, Bye Bye Birdie, The Drowsy Chaperone, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Ordinary Days, A New Brain, [title of show] and Reefer Madness (Squabbalogic); A Year With Frog and Toad (Ensemble); and Fighting and The Venetian Twins (New Theatre).

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