Musical Theatre Update

Jay Kuo’s musical Insignificant Others was just awarded the Bay Area Critics Circle Award for best original script of a new musical! This is an exciting honor for this show that we’re going to be opening at the Zeum Theatre in Yerba Buena in mid-July. We have a great cast and will be starting rehearsals before you know it in June.
Check out the website for this world premiere musical production.


In the meantime, rehearsals for Jekyll & Hyde at Palo Alto Players continue to be fun and exciting. This is a really big show and we’re doing some fun and exciting things with it. This production opens at the end of April. Don’t miss it.
This is the Palo Alto Players website.


Another exciting project is Songs For A New World a revue of truly marvelous songs by genius songwriter Jason Robert Brown. His music is complex and beautiful. The lyrics are deep, moving, funny and thought provoking. Four talented singing actors will be performing this show for Ray Of Light Theatre Company at the Eureka Theatre in downtown San Francisco starting May 11th.
Ray Of Light Theatre is presenting a concert version of The Secret Garden this month before we start work on Songs For A New World.
http://www.roltheatre.com/index.html

I’m excited to be directing all three of these theatrical projects for 3 different companies! It is quite a busy spring. I hope everyone gets to see these shows between April and August of this year.

On Being Human - Making Mistakes

I saw this today and thought it was great. This is good stuff for me to remember as I am in rehearsals for Jekyll & Hyde and working to foster an environment where actors can create. A safe place for them to make mistakes. I think it is only through making those mistakes and having the freedom to make them that we arrive where we need to be in the process of making a play. The following is out of a book called Days of Healing, Days of Joy by Earnie Larsen and Carol Larsen Hegarty:

"I can't. I shouldn't. It's my fault." These self-abasing and self-defeating thoughts are expressions of shame. Because repeated thoughts turn into beliefs and long-held beliefs turn into actions, thoughts rooted in shame can lead to tragedy.

People who live in shame come to believe that it is not okay to make a mistake. They imagine they should know what to do without having to learn it. They think their wrong judgments mean they themselves are wrong.

But it is human to make mistakes. If we acknowledge we are human, we are defining ourselves as people who always have something to learn (Thomas Edison failed to perfect the light bulb until his ten-thousandth try). We are saying we have to keep going if our plans don't work out right away (Walt Disney went bankrupt seven times before he met with success).

"Thou shalt not be human" is the command of shame. What rubbish! How can we be anything else? Why would we want to be?