Heh. Funny story.

Last year was kind of crazy, in the sense of being both very busy and just an awful mess at my day job. When I was able to work on my own stuff (like this show) at all, it was mostly in fits and starts, and although I liked much of what I was doing, it was hard to stay focused on it for any length of time, so I’d build up a great head of steam over a period of days or weeks and then have to stop abruptly, and it was kind of difficult to get any real momentum going again later.

So by the end of last year, I had made up my mind: come hell or high water, 2010 was going to be “my year.” I was going to commit to things and get things done, and toward that end, I actually got my ass in gear and sent out several script submissions, most of which didn’t really pan out. This wasn’t surprising, obviously, because they usually don’t – it’s the nature of the business, and that coupled with the recent economy makes it even more unlikely that anyone who isn’t someone’s wife or boyfriend or son-in-law or something is going to have a whole lot of attention paid to their work. The point was, I did what I needed to do, and I was feeling pretty good about it. And then back in mid-March, I found out that one of my straight plays had actually been accepted for a reading series here in NYC.

Now. This story does not end up casting the organization that runs the series in a terribly flattering light, so that’s all I’m going to say about them (no names, no details – I’m annoyed at what happened, but I am a firm believer in not badmouthing anyone in this business, ever). What happened was a very long and involved story and this isn’t the place for it, but here’s the gist: Mine was one of three plays chosen for this series, from a field of five finalists (that’s important later), culled from I have no idea how many submissions, but I’m guessing roughly … a lot, because you know. It’s an open-call submission for scripts in New York City, and it’s a pretty large group that puts this thing on. Fairly early in the process, something happened that was completely beyond anyone’s control (and with which I am entirely sympathetic), and we lost our producer. Fortunately, I had a standby producer who was willing to step up and take the lost producer’s place. Unfortunately, the group that was producing the series didn’t think they wanted to work with him, because he’s quite young and inexperienced. Which I understand, except that the whole point of the series is to train young and less experienced producers. Also? Without meaning to denigrate anyone’s skills or abilities, we’re talking about an Equity staged reading. My seventeen-year-old niece could have done this job, and I’m not being hyperbolic or ironic or anything — a bright, motivated high school student, with a clearly written set of instructions and a modicum of adult supervision could absolutely have fulfilled all the necessary obligations of producing this reading. What we later found out was that the show they now wanted to replace ours with had recently acquired a “Broadway producer.” I have no idea exactly what that means, except that the words “Broadway producer” were always typed in quotes that way, which seems to suggest we’re probably not talking about Cameron Macintosh, but I digress.

Now, all the while that we’re running around madly trying to keep this show in the series, we’re assuming (meaning me, my would-be producer, a director friend who was being considered to direct this play, and the few friends to whom I had given the details of the situation) that the play we’re about to be replaced with is one of the two plays that made it as far as the finalist round but didn’t get one of the three spots. Except … uh-uh. Apparently this is just some other random play that had been submitted (and passed on) the year before, and which I was told flat out by the organizers was not as good a play as mine, but since the focus of this series is to develop and train producers, the quality of the play is less important. Except (and maybe this is just me) if the guy producing the other show is a “Broadway producer” what the heck are these guys going to train him to do, exactly? Are they grooming him to produce on Pluto? I mean, as we say in Brooklyn: not for nothin’, but if this man has Broadway producing credits on his résumé, I have hard time picturing him lying awake nights, thinking “now if I only I can get a gig producing one-off, script-in-hand reading for (unnamed theater organization). That’d be a real feather in my cap.”

So anyway, this drags on for a couple of days, before we are finally told definitively that we are out of the series. And call me a terrible, paranoid, suspicious person, but my guess is that what probably happened was that at some point, the organizers heard through the grapevine that the play they had passed on last year now had a “Broadway producer” attached to it, and immediately, quite logically thought. “Hmm. How can we make this work for us?” And at the first sign of any setback with any of the plays in the series (ours just happened to be it), they figured this was the perfect opportunity to get the previously passed-on play into this year’s series, and thus make a connection with probably-not-Cameron-Macintosh. I’m guessing the only reason we were kept guessing for as long as we were is because they were madly running around behind the scenes, trying to explain to the people involved with the replacement show why it was so urgent that they step up and replace us, despite the fact that by doing so, they were now dissing not only me, but also the other two finalists, and it took them that long to get a commitment from them.

Okay. So. These things happen. I’m pissed off and disappointed, but what am I going to do?

And now … the punchline:

About an hour before I get the call telling me that were are absolutely out, a friend of mine whom I haven’t seen for a while stops by my desk to say hello. She went back to grad school a while back, and changed her hours from full to part time, so she hasn’t been around for a while, and she innocently asks me what’s up. I reply: #$*)_@?!! PL!IUO!! !..

“Why? What happened?”
“Well, remember that reading series I got into? It looks like we’re about to be kicked out.”
“How come?”
“Well, the short answer is, we lost our producer.”
“Oh. Well. Could you be back in if you had a new producer? Because I know one. My mom has been friends for years with (Name Redacted and okay, not Cameron Macintosh either? But a very big Broadway producer. Seriously.)”

Now. Maybe this is also just evil and wrong of me, but I’m the kind of person who, when she finds out she’s one degree of separation from Name Redacted and Okay, Not Cameron Macintosh Either? But a Very Big Broadway Producer. Seriously, thinks: I am not about to waste a connection like this on a one-off, script-in-hand reading for (unnamed theater organization). So I said, well, I don’t really think it would be appropriate to ask someone like that to become involved with something like this. But I added, half-jokingly, “it’s something to keep in mind when I finish this musical.”

To which she replied: “Oh totally. Let me know when it’s done. I’ve known him for years. If I gave it to him, I’m sure he’d at least look at it.”

So. While I’m still not at the full-on sour grapes stage of “being thrown out of this series was the best thing that could have happened to me,” I have to admit that this probably worked out quite well, because it forced me to take a look at the show and realize that I am a lot closer to being done than I realized. The lyrics are about halfway done, the book is in decent shape, although I still want to cut about five pages from it, and I’ve since spoken to my director friend (who is the same guy who directed the table reading of the book of this show back at the end of 2008, and we’ve decided that later this month we’ll do one last reading of the book, make whatever last round of revisions are necessary to get it “perfect,” and then work balls-out on the score through the rest of the summer. Which is something I would never have had time to do if I’d been working on this reading.

With luck, I’ll be able to send it out for a lot of the grants and prizes I missed the deadlines for last year, and the new short-term goal is to do a staged reading of the whole show in October, in front of a small audience that will hopefully include my friend’s producer friend.

So that's where things stand as of right now. With luck, I will have much more to say on things as they develop over the next few weeks.