Here comes another one!

Let me explain the situation behind my possible upcoming flirtation with professional theater:

A man named Gary with an extremely Italian-sounding last name owns a company that essentially flips towns the way antique automobile dealers flip cars. They take a large portion of real estate that's fallen on hard times and they gentrifying it, encouraging retail, restaurants, malls and (most importantly for me) theaters. This man Gary has been working on Asbury Park, a very extraordinarily run-down old town on the Jersey Shore. Bruce Springsteen got his start there; think of the kind of people who'd intimately relate to the lyrics in "Born in the USA" and you've got the general vibe of the place. Gary hired Chris Barker, another young theater artist like us, to start a new theater company in the giant space they have on the boardwalk. Chris heard Matt Schwartz's CD of Rufio, and decided that a good original project for next season would be a flashy Peter Pan musical, and so contacted Matt and Danny and spoke to them about getting it produced.

Nothing is official right now. Until the season is over and the ticket sales are accounted for, Chris can't sign off on a contract saying "I will produce this play for x amount of dollars". I'd like to think it's more likely than not that we'll be produced, but the nagging pessimist in me keeps telling me to prepare for disappointment. In the meantime, this fellow Gary with the extremely Italian sounding last name heard some woman write a song about Frankenstein and bells suddenly started sounding in his head and he asked Chris if he could produce some kind of Frankenstein musical for Halloween. Chris subsequently asked Matt and Danny if they would write some songs for it.

Now we have no idea who this "woman with a Frankenstein song" is, and I personally don't understand why, if she wrote one song already, she wouldn't be interested in writing all of them. Also, my name apparently did not come up in this Frankenstein conversation, so it's not yet certain whether I'd be invovled in this show at all. She could just provide a story outline with a few song ideas, then give it to all of us for a good flesh-out, or she might want to write the whole script around the songs Danny and Matt will write over the course of the summer, etc. So, at the moment, there are two projects way up in the air, one so much so that it needs oxygen supplements to survive on a regular basis. I guess this is the life I'm going to lead.