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Yes, I do more than cartoons. Welcome to the world inside my head, where characters can move and there's actually sound. Here are some of the musical projects I am currently working on. A couple even have their own web sites, where you can hear some of the music. Enjoy the show. Despairadise A troupe of nihilistic European art film makers finds their paradise of despair shattered when their director discovers love and happiness. Despairadise will shake your faith in cynicism! In 2005, I reached out to an old friend, Rich Prezioso, a renowned songwriter and performer on the national folk tour, to turn this loopy idea into a musical. Working through the Musical Theatre Writers Workshop at Theatre Building Chicago, under the direction of John Sparks, we soon started convincing folks that this cynical look at cynicism actually carried an important message. Even while it plays as madcap fun from start to finish. After a successful staged reading in January, 2007, Despairadise was one of eight new musicals presented in the international Stages Festival in August of that same year. Then it inaugurated the Encore Theatre Company's Litehouse series in Dayton. Currently the show is working its way to a more substantial staging. Stay tuned! My Dead Irish Mother My Dead Irish Mother is, as you would expect, about a young man and his dead Irish-American mother. It opens with a line stolen from the caption of one of my New Yorker cartoons. The mother, lying in her casket, looks over at her son kneeling by her side and says, "You couldn't put on a tie?" What follows is a bumpy ride to resting in peace. The show has had a staged reading last May Theatre Building Chicago, and has another in Dayton in November. And a full production is in the works. Stay tuned for details. You'll laugh hard, cry harder, you'll go home and call your mother. More Also in the works is a musical revue about middle-aged men and a certain blue pill. That show is appropriately entitled Flop! I am writing lyrics and collaborating with best-selling satirist James Finn Garner on the book. Rich Prezioso is composing again, and multiple Jefferson Award winner Greg Kolack is directing. Other projects in development include a children's musical, Fässi Goboggan and the Curly Headed Girl, and a rewrite of Pitchmen, a show where the devil hires an ad agency. That was the show that gathered national press as just a neighborhood parish musical, and subsequently launched my collaborator, composer Paul Libman, and me into this mad pursuit. Many more ideas, of course, are jotted down in my notebook, awaiting an opportunity to be written. And that is suspenseful in its own right.
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