Today I wrote what may be the three most satisfying words a dramatist writes: END OF PLAY. They went on the bottom of page 103 in Scene 12 of a new full-length comedy. (One only hopes there will eventually be audiences and if they materialize, that they will laugh.) This [...] Continue reading »
Dramatic Birth Defects
If I write a play of surpassing quality, it will get produced, if not now then eventually. That assumption has hovered somewhere behind my laptop screen for the 15 years that I have been writing plays. And most days I keep the faith. Its corollary is a pill harder to [...] Continue reading »
‘Act One’ Headed for the Stage
Fifteen years ago I got fed up with hearing myself blabber about how I planned to write a play and actually sat my butt down and wrote my first script. An important impetus for my shift from fantasy to reality, from wannabe to doing it, was the 1959 memoir Act [...] Continue reading »
Famed Composer Discusses Art of Musical Theatre
A 20-minute audio recording of a presentation famed composer Alan Menken gave in Seattle last November has just been released. Alan, accompanying himself on piano, discusses the craft of creating musical theatre and composing. I helped moderate Alan’s talk. Readers interested in these subjects (audience or artist) will enjoy this [...] Continue reading »
The Value of Grit for Kids and Artists
A debate is underway in the U.S. about education, with ramifications extending to social policy for alleviating poverty, or at least for improving the ability of the next generation to escape from poverty. In some respects it is a variation on the nature vs. nurture debate. Since at least the [...] Continue reading »
Content Trumps Media, Say ‘Book of Mormon’ Musical Creators
Last month, just about the time I was seeing the national touring production of The Book of Mormon in Seattle, the news broke that the creators of the musical, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, were forming a production company called Important Studios, valued at $300 million. Several aspects of this [...] Continue reading »
Our Brain Hungers for Narrative
Telling stories is at the center of my world. Of course I still do lots of other things but in this latter stage of my life they have been relegated to the status of planets that revolve around my story-telling sun. As a storyteller I pay a lot of attention [...] Continue reading »
Seinfeld, with Friends, Getting Coffee
In a recent post I wrote about Jerry Seinfeld’s devotion to the craft of comedy writing and delivery. As I was researching that post I learned about Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, an innovative, understated Web series that Seinfeld created and produced last year. His framing device is to drive a [...] Continue reading »
Obsessive Craftsmanship Underpins Seinfeld’s Comedy
I suppose that until recently I carried around with me an unexamined assumption that what stand-up comics do is, well, stand up and take off on largely improvised riffs that make people laugh (most of the time). And I would contrast that with playwrights and screenwriters who in the fiftieth [...] Continue reading »
How to Live a Cultured Life
How does one lead a good life? What does it mean to be a good person? These are profound questions that any thoughtful person worthy of that adjective regularly explores. Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), in the below letter to his older brother Nikolai, reflected on cultured people and identified eight qualities [...] Continue reading »