Tickets for DC available!

I am very pleased and excited to announce that tickets for the Washington, DC performances of my new musical, The Fall of the House of Usher, are now on sale! If you're looking for a very reasonably-priced night out at the theater, $15 tickets to see an epic production of The Fall of the House of Usher are the way to go.

To get your tickets (and for directions to our venue) please go to

http://www.usherthemusical.com/tickets.htm Or, if you don't trust the internet, you can call to get tickets at: 1-866-811-4111

To learn more about The Fall of the House of Usher you can visit our website at http://www.usherthemusical.com

Feel free to send this information to anyone you might think would be interested.

Pictures Coming Soon!

In just a few days we've already blocked through the entire show. The actors are all extremely hard working and talented, and I've enjoyed working with them a whole lot. Next week I'm going to at least try putting up new pictures of our rehearsal process on the website every day.

The music is also going very well- I finished the last song and the cast is already memorizing things. The actor playing William is especially adept at looking at a song and then being able to play the guitar and sing it from memory within a half hour. Very, very impressive.

The Final Countdown

The cast gets in tomorrow and we're really excited. The set is looking great- huge columns- 11 feet 4 inches, to be exact- and almost equally tall walls are now on the Woodberry stage getting primed and painted. Not sure exactly how we're going to transport everything, but....

They've also built and painted a beautiful box that we're putting our "glass armonica" in. The tech crew thought that we had some drill bits that might drill through glass (allowing us to use our real glass bowls to build an actual and functioning armonica) but after a very painful and difficult to listen to trial (have you ever heard the sound of glass being drilled? Don't try it.) we decided to just pack the bowls in hidden Styrofoam to keep them in place. As the audience, you will not see this hidden Styrofoam. Don't look for it. That's why it is hidden.

In other news, the website is getting pretty close to completion- if you haven't already, go sign up to be on our listserv so you can get an e-mail when it's time to buy tickets. We'll probably send a total of four or five e-mails from this listserv, so it's not like you'll be spammed to death.

Today, I'm working on the last touches of music. I should probably get back to that...

We Have Casts!

Finally, both Exiles and Usher are fully cast- and with some extremely talented people, if I may say. The final piece was finding an actor/singer/guitarist, and I'm happy to say we've got an AMAZING classical guitarist/singer/actor in our corner now.

His sister, whom I did not know, was a member of the William and Mary Orchestra. When I sent out a plea to the orchestra for violinists/violists/cellists, she apparently sent it to him just in case. He sent me an e-mail asking me if I needed (on the off-chance) a classical guitarist for the pit orchestra, and so I e-mailed him back asking if he (on the off-chance) also sang and acted. As it turns out, he does. And does quite well at all three. We'll have to work some on getting his voice to sound more minstrel-y (it's just a bit too well trained to sound authentic), but that's something I'm more than happy to work on.

This, in addition to our crew and pit that are shaping up, makes me much more relaxed and very happy. The only things missing right now are a violist and a cellist. If anyone knows of any, shoot me a line. I have roughly 20 days to find them both. Not too bad.

In other news, the website is almost up. Now, don't go about forwarding this address to lots of people until there is clear and useful information everywhere, but I'd love your opinions on the layout of the site in general- www.usherthemusical.com

At the Beach

Trying to write music. The "final" audition set for both Usher and Exiles is this evening. Hopefully we finish out our awesome cast and by the time we start rehearsals I will have finished the music! Maybe...

The Reason I Post Sporadically

I realized recently that one of the main reasons my posting is so random is because I don't like writing anything down when things are uncertain. I really shouldn't shy away from talking about that, because these times of uncertainty are probably going to be among the most interesting to look back on.

Last night we had our audition in Charlottesville for both Usher and Mr. C's play, "Exiles from the Sun." We found a good possible cast for Exiles, but unfortunately we still haven't found someone who is able to sing, act, AND play guitar for the role of William in Usher. We've decided that we can make do without a guitar-playing William, but that still leaves us to find a talented singer/actor. Our possibilities right now are good, but there are some scheduling conflicts which make me nervous and stress me out. Depending on other people in general stresses me out. Once I've worked with a person and know what his or her work ethic is like that stress diminishes, but at the start of a project- working with people I don't know- you never know who's going to flake out or quit the show entirely. We had an issue with this during Tragedy!.

Part of me is especially concerned that this part of Tragedy was so easy in comparison... I think (though I may be looking at the past through rose-colored lenses). This musical is much better (well, very different) and more ready than Tragedy ever was to be put on stage, but we lack the massive manpower that we had two years ago.

I know that things will come together, eventually, and it's going to be awesome. By eventually, I'm hoping for next week. Look for that...

Marketing Materials

Just spent the past couple of days scrambling to put together all of the marketing material for the DC show.  We have ten days now until the marketing stuff is due for NYC and so we'll see if we need to make some slight changes.

We mailed in our registration to NYC yesterday for both "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "Exiles From the Sun," which is Mr. C's play that he also submitted.  We plan on using much of the same cast and crew for both shows, which makes our little adventure all the more insane.  I can't wait to get started!