It’s November 5, 2020. I’m sitting at my kitchen table in my new apartment, eating oatmeal with blueberries and bananas, and drinking coffee. Today, I have a few remote meetings in the afternoon. Besides that, I’ll be watching election results and hopefully getting outside for a walk. It’s a beautiful day in New Jersey.
I’m making some tweaks to the website, which is hard for me. Squarespace is probably the most user friendly option out there, but I still feel like I am barely using it to its potential. I had a computer crash two weeks ago and I lost a lot of music I hadn’t backed up, but I found that some of it is here on this website. If only I could figure out how to pull it off the Squarespace back end and safely onto my hard drive. I have an email out to the support team, so we’ll see.
I’m trying to get a virtual Eleventh Hour event off the ground for late December, and am also beginning work on two virtual theatre projects that will come to fruition next Spring. Virtual theatre is becoming an area of expertise for me. Since March, I’ve worked on these virtual theatre pieces:
The Ensemble Project- 6 original nonfiction musicals by 4th graders.
Romeo and Juliet- a truncated cut of Shakespeare’s play, with a virtual group of teenagers
Mickle Fust- an original musical by Rich Armstead and me. We performed that one LIVE on Streamyard.
The Last City- an original musical I wrote with a group of teens that we performed live on Zoom.
Twelfth Night- a high school musical that had to go virtual ONE WEEK BEFORE OPENING! We pivoted to virtual and presented a two-night broadcast of footage the students created in their homes of themselves singing, reading lines, and dancing. It was awesome.
I like virtual theatre because I feel like I have a uniquely positive mindset about it. What are the assets? So many people look at theatre in Covid from a deficit perspective: what did we lose? It causes theaters to close. It causes playwrights and actors to not pursue work. It depresses the industry. But if working in the trenches of original musical theatre for 8 years has taught me anything, it’s never to doubt that what you’re working on is special and necessary in the moment. I’ve watched musicals I’ve written with groups of students go up in the hallway of a school building because no classroom/library/theatre space was available. It doesn’t take anything away, except it requires that an audience expand their mindset about what theatre is.