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April 24, 2020

All 50 States Day 33: North Carolina!

All 50 States Day 33:

North Carolina!

My first comedy interaction with North Carolina was with a booker there that ran a comedy club and booked other clubs and dates in the South. I was starting to feature on the road, performing the 30-minute middle slot of the typical opener-feature-headliner format, and a comic in Chicago suggested I contact the North Carolina booker. “They’ll love you,” he insisted. Apparently this club was an early booster of Carrot Top, who in the mid-90s was one of the top grossing comedians in the country.

The club charged $25 to review a comedian’s tape, a suspicious and unsettling policy, but I sent in my tape and a check and waited to hear back. Months passed. Then more. I started going on the road and doing a few colleges, all the while writing new material and improving my act.

The club had cashed my check, I had a record of that, but as the one-year mark arrived I hadn’t heard anything back from the club. So I sent them an anniversary card.

I wrote lovingly of my year of anticipation and waiting for a reply. I did my best to balance my tone between lighthearted ribbing and “OMG, F you so much!” Whatever I wrote, the gambit worked and I got a reply.

After a year of waiting they gave me a modestly positive review, what felt like a B- to me. They told me to start sending in my avails (schedule and bookings) and maybe they’d find me some feature work. I had developed a lot as a comic over that year and the 15-20 minutes on the tape they had reviewed was no longer representative of my act so I felt that when I got booked at one of their clubs I’d improve in their estimation.

That chance never came since that booker never booked me, but I have played several shows in North Carolina over the years, from big universities like Wake Forest, UNC–Asheville, UNC—Charlotte, to smaller colleges like Elon and Greensboro College. I had a very unique show in an outdoor amphitheater at the Raleigh Little Theater back in 1999, part of a Comedy Central live event, and I once did an open mic in Asheville when I was passing through in 2010.

On a different trip to Asheville I spent a few extra days there when my car broke down only 40 miles into my drive back to New York. My engine shut off as I was coming down a mountain—just cut out completely—and I coasted to the bottom of the hill, down an off-ramp and onto the grass. The car wouldn’t restart. It was Sunday and people were starting to return home from church and several people stopped to check on me. One guy called his cousin who was mechanically inclined to ask for advice. I think I met everyone who lived in that holler, a diverse bunch and they were all very friendly, and eventually they helped me call a tow truck (it was the distributer).

I had my car towed to a Firestone that would open in the morning, I checked into a motel within walking distance, and took it as a good omen when my motel TV was playing a Cubs game on WGN.

I have few pictures of North Carolina but apparently plenty of stories! There was that other time in Asheville…

Selife with the crew at Wake Forest, 2010
Polaroid of the Blue Ridge Motor Lodge, 2010
Polaroid of the Mount Vue Motel, 2010
State Line!

January 7, 2020

The Show Must Go On… Eventually!

This is the week I was going to start the big promotional campaign for the March debut of my musical, but issues with the venue and changes at the theater group have led them to cancel the production. Despite my deep disappointment at the news I hope there is some good that can come from the experience, and I still fervently believe in the quality and commercial viability of the project. I know it will hit the stage someday.

First thing to mention on the positive side is that the table read I did with the theater group in June of 2019 went really well. Not only did it renew my conviction that this work I spent most of 2015 creating is an appealing story with a funny script, it led me to do a fresh punch-up draft of the book. And just last week, with the fresh draft in hand, I submitted the project to a theater festival for the first time since 2017.

Another big task I had to tackle for the now-canceled March debut was to create and transcribe five-piece scores for the 20 songs in the musical. I had existing, fully arranged demos for all the songs but I had so far only written out a few of the pieces as lead sheets. To create a five-piece score for each of the songs I had to consolidate the arrangements from the demos into five parts; and digging back into the project files from the demo recordings required me to transfer all of the session files from Pro Tools to Logic Pro X, which is what I run my studio on after converting in late 2016.

Creating these scores took the better part of my free time in September and October, and with the production now canceled could be considered a colossal waste of time. But the fact is I know have finished five-piece scores of the entire musical, along with a new overture and incidental music, and these scores aren’t going anywhere. It will be less work for the next production.

Working on the scores was also really satisfying. Up until this point I had only created lead sheets for songs, or at most a score with a melody/vocal line and a basic piano accompaniment. When the theater group offered to stage the musical I took on the challenge of writing out the scores. With some pointers and encouragement from a good friend Scott Wasserman, who does this kind of thing for a living, I dove in, learned a lot, got up to speed on the amazing freeware app MuseScore, and got it done. Between the confidence gained and the actual scores there are a lot of real benefits gained from the project, even with this production being shut down.

So that’s the status of the musical. I usually don’t post such long behind-the-scenes stories—I prefer to let my work speak for itself—but since I had announced the worldwide debut of the musical I felt it somewhat necessary to explain its absence from my show calendar. Don’t worry, when it gets into a festival or we put on a staged reading, and when it finally does debut, I’ll start yammering about it all over again.