TRU Offering "Producer Boot Camp" for the Three Theatre Souls Not on Breadlines

Courtesy of PR extraordinaire Michelle Tabnick:

TRU PRODUCER BOOT CAMP
Raising Money for Theater:
How, Who and When to Ask
produced by Theater Resources Unlimited
and featuring producers Richard Frankel, Cheryl Wiesenfeld
Saturday, January 24 from 10am – 6pm

As a disheartening number of shows are closing, Theater Resources Unlimited (TRU) opens up possibilities for tomorrow’s productions with an all-day intensive workshop about crucial aspects of raising money for theater on Saturday, January 24 from 10am–6pm at The Players Theatre, 115 MacDougal Street (below W. 3rd Street), NYC.

It’s a tough economy, no doubt about it. All the more reason why people need support and the skills to go about the business of producing. Attendees will acquire basic tools and information that will help them to function effectively in these times and the better days that are surely ahead. From networking techniques to legal requirements and effective business planning, plus a wealth of first-hand experience from more than a half dozen producers who are currently active in the Broadway and off-Broadway worlds, TRU promises an informative, empowering and inspiring day.

Admission is $175 ($150 for early registration before 1/19); $25 off for members of TRU. Payment by check may be mailed to Theater Resources Unlimited, 309 W. 104th Street 1D, NYC NY 10025. On-line payment by Paypal or by credit card is available at www.truonline.org/store.html. Preregistration is available by emailing trunltd@aol.com. Applications are available at www.truonline.org/BootCampApp.htm.

For more information about TRU membership, visit www.truonline.org or call 212-714-7628.

NOTE: You can see the full agenda for the boot camp here.

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Readings Announced for 2008 TRU Voices New Musicals Series

As per a press release I received today...

Theater Resources Unlimited
Announces the
2008 TRU Voices New Musicals Series
Free readings of
Once Upon a Wind and So Happy I Could Scream!
December 8 and 15, 2008 at the Players Theatre

Theater Resources Unlimited (TRU) is pleased to announce the winning selections of the 2008 TRU Voices New Musicals Series. In a series that is unique because it develops new producers as well as new musicals, two works were chosen from submissions by emerging or established producers, as well as writers. The works will be read on Mondays, December 8 and 15, 2008 at 7:30pm at the Players Theatre, located at 115 MacDougal Street, NYC.

The musicals chosen for the TRU Voices Series are: Once Upon a Wind, a musical about love, magic and lies by Tom Diggs and Jay D’Amico, produced by Sheila McDevitt; and So Happy I Could Scream!, a musical celebration of motherhood, with book by Judy Freed, music by Sari Miller, lyrics by Randi Wolfe and additional lyrics by Sari Miller, produced by Meredith Lucio/Wild Bird Productions.

Once Upon a Wind, with book and lyrics by Tom Diggs, music by Jay D'Amico, will be read on December 8, 2008 at 7:30pm, produced by Sheila McDevitt and directed by Jeremy Dobrish,

In war torn England, two teens attempt to make sense of their lives as they come of age through the lens of love, magic … and lies. Based on the Cottingley Fairy Hoax, Once Upon a Wind is the story of the two teenagers who faked fairy photos during World War One and briefly fooled a grieving nation. As a straight play titled Yorkshire Tales, it won The Aurand Harris Prize, was a Princess Grace finalist, and was the ATHE Playworks selection for 2007 before it received an Off-Off Broadway workshop produced by On the Leesh Productions at The Michael Weller Theatre in October 2007.

Tom Diggs (book and lyrics) has had his work performed at major regional theatres, including East/West Players, Intiman Theatre, The Seattle Rep, and Moving Arts (L.A.). His play, Harper Lee’s Husband, was a part of the 2005 Pittsburgh New Works Festival The Vital Theatre’s Vital Signs, and was a finalist for a Samuel French Award. Nu Shu, was part of the Kennedy Center’s New Works Festival in April 2006. The book for Once Upon a Wind won the Aurand Harris Award at NETC in 2006 and was developed at PlayWorks in July 2007. In the summer of 2007, The Kennedy Center and The National New Play Network commissioned Fair and Decent, which opened the 2007-2008 Luna Stage season in October. Mandala is currently being developed by The Lark and The Kennedy Center. Tom recently graduated from NYU’s Tisch of the Arts with an MFA in Dramatic Writing. He was named a Dramatist Guild Fellow for 2007-2008 and is currently a member of the BMI Lyricists Workshop.

Jay D’Amico (music) made an impact on the jazz scene with his CD Ponte Novello in 2001. He recently returned to the inspirations of Italy with his CD Tuscan Prelude. D’Amico’s unique style blends jazz and classical influences. Under the auspices of Art Podell of the New Christie Minstrels, D’Amico recorded a single which enjoyed near hit status. From 1984 through September 10, 2001, D’Amico performed as the Pianist-in-Residence at New York’s Windows on the World. In 1990, he released the solo recording, From the Top. He released Ponte Novello in 2001, which featured D’Amico’s original compositions along side his arrangements of arias by Puccini, Verdi and Bellini.

Jeremy Dobrish (director) - Recent Off Broadway: Inner Voices: Solo Songs (Zipper), Spain (MCC), Election Day (Second Stage). Regional: Barrington Stage, Goodspeed, Hangar, North Shore, NY Stage and Film, O’Neill, Village. Theatreworks USA: Curious George (writer/director), and Paul Revere. Festivals: Fringe, NYMF, SPF. Jeremy has served as an Artistic Associate at Second Stage, and was the Artistic Director of adobe theatre company for 13 years, for which he has written and/or directed over twenty plays. He also directed Hell Hole Honeys in the 2007 TRU Voices New Musicals Series.

Sheila McDevitt (producer) is the founder and co-Artistic Director of id Theater, a development based company dedicated to the playwright and making better theater…one play at a time. To date, id’s Seven Devils Playwrights Conference has produced over 70 staged and sit-down readings over 9 years. id’s NYC Sit In! gives playwrights in NYC a chance to hear their works in an East Village venue once a month. Sheila also co-produced for Quirk Productions for many years, a company dedicated to re-telling and adapting the mythic Greek story cycles. Sheila also acts and directs.

So Happy I Could Scream! will be read on December 15, 2008 at 7:30pm. Book by Judy Freed, music by Sari Miller, lyrics by Randi Wolfe and additional lyrics by Sari Miller, produced by Meredith Lucio, Wild Bird Productions. The show was developed at Theatre Building Chicago.

So Happy I Could Scream! is a musical revue celebrating the challenges and rewards of motherhood. Touching, humorous, and thought-provoking, it transports the audience to a bewildering world of love, relationships, discipline, gender roles, career paths, sex, family planning, and facing the empty nest. Featuring an upbeat mix of contemporary song styles, monologues, and scenes, So Happy I Could Scream! will appeal to anyone who is a mother – or has one. So Happy I Could Scream! began at a kitchen table in the Chicago suburbs and was developed at Theatre Building Chicago, where it was seen in the Monday Night Musicals series and at Stages 2007, a festival of new musicals-in-progress. It recently received a concert reading at the Paramount Theatre in Aurora, Illinois.

Judy Freed (book) has seen her plays and musicals performed in the United Kingdom, New York, California, Massachusetts, Washington, and throughout the Midwest. Her writing has been recognized by the National Music Theater Conference and the American Alliance for Theatre & Education. Musicals include Sleepy Hollow (developed at the ASCAP/Disney Musical Theater Workshop and produced throughout the Midwest); Emma & Company (named a “theatrical highlight of 2001” by Back Stage); Me and Al, or How I Died in the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre (showcased at the International Festival of Musical Theatre); and Somebody Else’s Troubles (featuring the songs of Grammy-winning songwriter Steve Goodman). Judy is a member of the Dramatists Guild, Inc. and Theatre Building Chicago’s musical theater writers workshop.

Sari Miller (music, additional lyrics) graduated from Barnard College, where she received the Program in the Arts Award in Music and the Lefrak Prize for Creative Writing in Music. Her song Chalom (the Dream), co-written with lyricist Sara Cohen, was a runner-up in the World Category of the 2001 John Lennon Songwriting Contest. Sari has worked as a musical director and performer for various children’s theater programs including New York Kids on Stage and Jewish Theater for Young Audiences. She is a member of Theatre Building Chicago’s musical theater writers workshop.

Randi Wolfe (lyrics) has been a member of Theatre Building Chicago’s musical theater writers workshop since 2004. A member of the Academy for New Musical Theatre in Los Angeles since 2006, she is currently serving on the ANMT Board of Directors. Equally important to her lyric-writing is her 30-year career working with children and parents. Having been a preschool teacher, day care center director, director of a family support center, and Associate Professor in Early Childhood Education, she relocated to Los Angeles in 2007 to work in workforce development in the early care and education industry. While her professional background lends insight to her lyrics, nothing has impacted her more profoundly than raising two children. Their love, patience, and inspiration have been at the center of her contribution to So Happy I Could Scream!

Meredith Lucio / Wild Bird Productions (producer) Producer of Best Musical in 2007 (Take Me America) and Best Musical (Commercial), Producer's Award for Excellence in 2008 (Opa!) at Midtown Theatre Festival. Writer of the Examiner.com Column about Producing Theatre in NYC.

For more information, visit www.truonline.org.

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Three Cheers for Howard Blau

I received this press release yesterday. Howie is a good friend and I'm very happy for him.

THEATER RESOURCES UNLIMITED
Announces Change in Board Leadership

Theater Resources Unlimited (TRU), a supportive network of producing organizations, announces a newly-appointed president of the Board of Directors, Howard L. Blau, effective January 14, 2008.

“This is a watershed moment in TRU’s twelve year history, an opportunity to bring in new leadership, new vision and new energy to propel us to a new level of service for the producing community,” stated TRU co-founder Bob Ost.

Howard L. Blau is a long-time TRU supporter, board member and an attorney in New York City with more than 37 years of practice in a wide array of legal matters. He has a special interest in helping not-for-profit organizations and has served as legal counsel to hundreds of artists and cultural institutions through a division of his company, Legal Services for the Performing Arts.
“I welcome this opportunity to serve the theater community, both not-for-profit and commercial. During the upcoming year, I plan to increase membership in TRU by 50% and to raise TRU’s profile,” Mr. Blau said.

Mr. Blau replaces Bob Ost as board president. Mr. Ost, who has served as president since TRU’s incorporation in 1995, will continue to serve as executive director and will also assume the title of Chairman of the Board.

“We welcome Howard’s expertise and leadership in his new role at TRU. This transition is an effort to stave off ‘founder’s syndrome.’ Too many worthy organizations fold when their founders need to move on and we want to make sure now that this won’t happen to TRU in the future,” said Mr. Ost.

The transition comes following an auspicious period of growth for TRU, which was founded in 1992 to promote a spirit of cooperation and support within the general theater community. Over the years, TRU grew into an information and resource conduit and began to offer a variety of entertainment-related services and resources that strengthen the business capabilities of producing organizations, individual producers, self-producing artists and other theater professionals.

Last year, TRU received funding for 2007 and 2008 from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs for the first time, and the company increased its operating budget by nearly 50%. In November, TRU hosted an immensely successful benefit at Sardi’s featuring appearances by theater legend Elaine Stritch and Tonya Pinkins, among others. In addition, producers Ken Davenport, Kristin Caskey of Fox Theatricals, Lauren Mitchell of Dodger, Stewart Lane, Randall Wreghitt, and Cheryl Wiesenfeld signed on as mentors in TRU’s Producer Mentorship Program, founded to guide career-path producer proteges with their current projects. The program currently has more than 35 active mentors who are producers and general managers working on and Off-Broadway.

TRU’s core program is a series of monthly seminars on a wide range of subjects important to theatrical producers and directors conducted by panels of experts from both the commercial and not-for-profit segments of Broadway, Off-Broadway and the motion picture industry. The seminars are open to the general public as well as TRU members. The company also publishes a bi-monthly newsletter and a monthly email newsletter update. In addition, TRU served as the umbrella organization for a co-production by several of its member companies as a part of the first annual New York Fringe Festival. From that experience, the organization expanded its production efforts by creating the TRU VOICES Annual New Play Reading Series and the TRU VOICES Annual New Musicals Reading Series in which TRU underwrites developmental readings of new works for theater. In 2001, TRU began giving annual scholarships to The Commercial Theater Institute, to encourage the development of aspiring producers; and in 2003, started an annual audition event to offer casting opportunities to TRU member producers.
Programs of Theater Resources Unlimited are supported in part by public funds awarded through the New York State Council on the Arts and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, as well as generous support from the Friar’s National Foundation Association.

For more information about TRU, including membership benefits, visit www.truonline.org.

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Touch Me in the Brobdingnagian, Then Just Walk Away

Brobdingnagian -- well, it's not the usual word I might use, although this evening, while appearing on a panel sponsored by TRU (Theatre Resources Unlimited), the word kept popping into my head. Perhaps it should have been part of a phrase in my head: Brobdingnagian out of a molehill. Or maybe, better yet: Brobdingnagian bitterness. You'll see why all this nattering adjective-as-noun nonsense in just a wee moment.

It was an interesting panel that featured my critic colleagues Andy Propst and Adam Feldman, my PR colleagues Susan Schulman and Judd Hollander, and playwright Jeffrey Sweet. Jeff was, of course, a very welcome addition to the gabfest: he is a prolific playwright, has taught playwriting (and written about it from a craft perspective for Back Stage), has worked as a critic, and for the Best Plays series now headed up by my friend Jeffrey Jenkins, has been a contributor, editor and commentator. Bob Ost, one of the TRU co-founders, led the discussion, and I must say all of us bucked up under the airless heat of the room quite well. And props to Propst for making sure I knew when it was time for me turn over so as to get my other side roasted. (All right, he didn't really...but I did ask him to.)

We talked about how theatre artists ought to get press and how (and when, and why) they ought not to get press -- all the usual stuff, and certainly valuable information for anyone in the room who didn't know various aspects of this already or who wanted to get into it with more specificity. I ended up mentioning some of the please-please-please-review-me swag I've gotten in the mail of late, including a press packet from the Andhow! Theater Company that included a fake press badge using my IT Awards photo as a negative (foreshadowing?). Some people in the audience, I think, mistakenly got the impression that stunt packaging and bribing me with swag either gets me to the show more quickly (or at all), but what I was doing was just making a point about how (and when, and why) a theatre artists ought to get a critic's attention. Later, in reply to a question that suggesting taking critics to lunch or dinner, I hurriedly backtracked to make sure everyone understood that I am not at all advocating bribery. Could you imagine ABSCAM for critics? CRITSCAM? The tempo of this story now suggests that a joke or a pun would follow, but I'll just continue, as I still have to finish my paper tonight for Glenn Young's class on tragedy at Hunter College, as the push continues for me to finish my master's before I'm older than Eric Bentley.

Anyway, I think Jeff was there so that Bob could raise ethics as an issue. Fair enough, fair game. Really, though, it seems as if Jeff is still carrying around, like a crown of bitter thorns around his intellect, this seething, toxic anger about what Hedy Weiss did in Chicago, what the Dramatists Guild far too rashly and self-righteously did about it, and how things ultimately reached some sort of unpleasant and unresolved stalemate. I would be remiss if I did not add that Jeff also blogged about the incident over at Back Stage's blog, and wrote some things that my executive editor, David Sheward, eventually made him retract. Personal agendas and the truth sometimes oppose each other, basically.

Anyway, there was just so much huffing and puffing about this that I was sure Jeff was going to blow the house down. Jeff's such a smart guy, but there's also just so much anger and bitterness there. And, you know, critics are a cheap target: sometimes attacking them strikes me as a way for people who can't come to grips with the fact that their work sometimes sucks to attempt to deflect the issue -- to create some Brobdingnagian smokescreen -- as if that will somehow serve to change reality. Thirty years from now, will Jeff still be fire-breathing "Hedy Weiss! Hedy Weiss! Hedy Weiss!"? Will it be like Gus Hall furiously banging his communist foot on a lectern somewhere for 14 people in the audience? Aren't there so many more fights in the world to be fought?

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