Prep Work

The pressure to sound refreshingly eloquent and use those wonderful long words that I find in crossword puzzles is too great, so I will do my best to ignore it and treat this as if I was emailing a friend on a day-to-some-other-day basis.

That being said, I am making this transition from actor to director and I want to document it here for me and for anyone else who might be interested.

Sometime in the fall of 2005 while I was playing Gus in GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES at Westchester Broadway Theatre, word got out that the theatre was going to produce THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE the following season. Given my history with the show, I was hoping they wouldn't ask me to be in it only because I felt like I had done all I could with the role of Jimmy in previous productions. My dressing roommate, Bill Bateman, turned to me one day backstage and said to me pointedly "You should direct it." I immediately dismissed the idea, not wanting the responsibility. How did I know how to do it? Besides, the theatre probably had at least ten directors in mind for the piece.

But Bill had planted something that grew, and I couldn't ignore the impulses and questions and voices that kept popping up and finally urged me to think about how I would direct that show. I had seen what worked and didn't work from the three vastly different productions I had been in, hadn't I? I knew how the show had to move, where the laughs were, where more could be found, and where extraneous ones could be omitted. I knew where the touching moments were and how to get to them; I knew how to tell the story.

I made an appointment with the producers, told them why I wanted to direct it and how I could make it work in their space and they hired me right then and there. Well, that was easy! Just say you're a director and BOOM: you're a director! It was a little like winning the lottery, I think. I don't know if I had ever gotten an acting job that easily. Anyway, a few months of prep work went by and my choreographer and I had put together (on paper and in our heads) a very tight, fun show.

Then the day came when the producers called me and said they had both Bad and Good News for me. The Bad News was that after seeing that the show was selling rather poorly for other regional theatres they had decided to pull it from their season. The Good News was that they still wanted me to direct a show there - it just happened to be a show I was appearing in at that very time: GREASE. I was very disappointed at losing MILLIE, but very quickly came around and started work with my choreographer on GREASE. And that was how I became a director. And I loved it. But that show ended and I was back to being an actor once again. I did a showcase in New York, an off-Broadway show, then another regional gig, but I was really finished with doing eight shows a week, especially in shows I wasn't very happy in.

I'm not done being an actor, necessarily. But I am done trying to fight the "in-between" years. The meaty leading man roles are still a few years ahead of me, and I'm so tired of playing the younger guys anymore. I know, I know, boo-hoo, boo-hoo. But I am tired of it. The challenge of an actor should be to keep finding new things, always learn from and grow in the role. However for me the challenge lately has been to just get through eight shows a week, let alone one performance of a poorly-written character in a poorly-written musical. But I digress.

I really like directing, plain and simple.

So in this blog, I will attempt to document the following processes (for now):

• Associate Directing VANITIES, A New Musical (this summer and fall)
• Directing THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE (this summer - FINALLY!)
• Meeting composers, librettists, writers, producers and trying to work!
• and the occasional rant or rave, review, comment, observation, etc...

So, here goes...