The son of classical musicians Marilyn Neeley and Robert Gerle, Andrew started his musical career as a classical pianist in the Baltimore area, appearing with local orchestras and on National Public Television. While attending Yale University, he won the Yale Symphony’s concerto competition and the National Symphony Orchestra’s Young Artists’ Competition, and appeared as guest soloist with both orchestras. During this time, he was also invited to participate in a private competition for Maestro Mstislav Rostropovich at the Kennedy Center.

After graduating magna cum laude from Yale, he moved to New York to work as a musical director and accompanist. Over the past 14 years, he has worked with such distinguished artists as Kitty Carlisle Hart, John Raitt, Leslie Uggams, Jennifer Holliday, Michael Rupert, and Liz Callaway. He was selected by the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization to create a complete re-orchestration of South Pacific for a major regional production, and has worked on projects for composers including Ricky Ian Gordon, Scott Frankel and Michael Korie and John Kander.

An accomplished orchestrator and arranger, Andrew’s symphonic orchestrations of Broadway standards have been performed by the Boston Pops and over a dozen other US symphony orchestras. He created an evening of new arrangements and orchestrations for the Baltimore Symphony’s Gershwin Centennial celebration, in which he also performed the “I Got Rhythm” Variations with the symphony. His work as a musical director has taken him from off-Broadway houses to regional theaters, and from Texas to Cape Cod.

As a musical theater composer, he is a three-time recipient of the Richard Rodgers Award for new musical writing, administered by Stephen Sondheim and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He won a 2006 Jonathan Larson Award for MEET JOHN DOE, which had its world premiere production at the Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. in 2007 and was nominated for seven Helen Hayes Awards. Last year, he was the first recipient of the Burton Lane Fellowship for Young Composers, awarded by the Theater Hall of Fame. His songs have been performed on Public Radio International, at Symphony Space and the Public Theater in New York, and on VH1’s Save the Music benefit. He has been a writer in residence at the Eugene O’Neill Music Theater Conference, and a Fellow at the MacDowell Artists’ Colony in New Hampshire and the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming.

Last fall, he was a visiting lecturer at Yale University, teaching two courses in musical theater composition. He recently made his cabaret debut with THROW IT TO THE WIND, an evening of new arrangements of the songs of Tony- and Academy Award-winning writers Richard Maltby, Jr. and David Shire, alongside Christa Justus. Last spring, he appeared in the first New York area revival of Terrence McNally’s MASTER CLASS, starring Tony nominee (and old friend) Barbara Walsh, and just this month made his Broadway debut, playing the “hands” of Coalhouse Walker Jr., in the pit of the critically-acclaimed revival of Ahrens & Flaherty’s RAGTIME at the Neil Simon Theater.