Good Time to Blog...Middle Eastern Melody of 2011

Now that The Road to Qatar! is officially announced and coming to off-Broadway's York Theatre in late January, it might be time to try to chronical this amazing journey from now to whenever. Last year at this time we had just come off of the amazing Lyric Stage (Irving Texas) production of Qatar and were pushing it forward as hard as we could. We had Paul Burchett excited and on board but the where of New York was a big questionmark. When the smoke cleared we realized that going the York (which has produced my musical After the Fair in 1999) was the obvious choice. We had done a reading of the show there (I have done readings at the York of Dodsworth, Grossinger's and other shows over the years) and it seemed the right fit for our 5 character musical COMEDY. And now here we are getting ready to cast the show. On Monday David Krane and I are doing our little (little HA!) "dog and camel show" for 30 people in a fancy townhouse that belonged to Al Hirschfeld and we hope to raise some more dough for this production and also for the future when this production moves to a commercial venue (the York is a not for profit with a limited engagement). Since this show is about our wacky and hiliarous cross cultural experience of writing the first American musical to premiere in the Middle East, it is fitting that David and I sing all the songs and play all the roles for this "backer's" thingie, but sheeh, it's exhausted to do and i wind up in a pool of sweat at the end (My late mother used to say she wasn't coming to see me perform because I sweated too much...I wonder if Louis Armstrong's mother told him that too) and let's face I am not as young as the character I am playing is. I am five years older than we were when we lived the story (but look much younger) and we are casting the roles of "us" 15 years younger than we are at least. The names and ages have been changed to protect the innocent.

I will try to be more bloggy and report how this is all going...meanwhile, get your tickets and visit

http://www.yorktheatre.org/