I’m fine, thanks.
What’s new on May 15th?
Well, lots of things. This website, for one. Nice, huh? Designed and hosted by Mike Sandler, this site lets you check out all my finished plays and a few songs. This page here will keep you up-to-date on recent or upcoming productions of my plays, new CDs or gigs, awards I may have won, shirts I may have purchased, and how many days left until I am completely bald (at this rate, about three).
Where to start? Well, April was a good month.
On April 9-12, my 10-minute play Something Went Wrong. debuted Off-Off-Broadway with the Brass Tacks Theatre Company. The director, Marcina Zaccaria, was extremely cool and inviting – it was really my first collaborative effort. Thanks to her ideas and dramaturgical skills, I was able to rewrite and refine the play, and I think her help made it twice as good as it was when she first got it. Daniel Roach and Melissa Schneider played the luckless husband and wife, and they were fabulous, even if they were both much too hot to be playing these parts. We even had an unbilled cameo from Andrew Chmelko as the hapless clown, and he was far better than my original concept for the role (that it would be played by a clown suit stuffed with bedsheets and old copies of Cracked magazines). Anyway, I thought the show was a success, and you can link to a great review of it here (I seem to have lost the link to the not-so-great review. Shucks).
On April 24th, Yes, Mamet had its Off-Off-Broadway premiere in the 9th Annual New York 15 Minute Play Festival, sponsored by Turnip Theatre, at the American Globe Theatre in Times Square. This wasn’t just a playwrighting contest, however; I had to produce the damn thing too. So rather than turn it over to a New York crowd, I auditioned some Delaware folk. My great friend Jeff Williams directed, and our wonderful cast included George Tietze, James Kassees, Jerry Ross, and Nancy Neufang-Stopyra. The show was a huge success – we did not win the audience vote (stupid chads), but the producers were impressed enough to nominate us for the Producer’s Choice Award, which would have allowed us to move on to the finals and three more shows. Well, we didn’t win that either, but we certainly made an impression on the New York stage and I made some good friends in the process.
On May 10th I played my first real music gig in over a year at Knappuccino’s Coffee House. The amazing Jill Knapp put this monthly coffee house together and it was truly a treat to perform my songs for an audience that was actually listening (well, it was a treat for me, anyway). Hopefully I’ll be back soon!
What’s coming up? On July 26th, don’t miss a production of Condensed Theatre Classics Presents: Lives in the Wind at the Wilmington Drama League. I’ll be directing this one-day-only show for the Chrysalis Players, so don’t miss it!
Thanks for checkin’ in…as Danny Costanzo told Snake, don’t be a stranger, all right?
Matt
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