30 Days of NYMF Day 16: Smoking Bloomberg

Smoking Bloomberg
by James Donegan, Co-Founder AnyMinuteNow Productions

It's hard for me to consider 30 days of NYMF because, for us at AnyMinuteNow Productions, the road to our opening this week was nearly a year. And for the writers of our show, it was more like two or three.

Last October, AMN decided we'd have a competition for new musicals called The NEXT BIG MUSICAL Competition. We wound up with a pile of scripts and CDs in early January and our Artistic Directors began the process of culling through them to find the three strongest contenders. From there, we did table reads of each of these finalists, leading up to a concert presentation of excerpts from each show at the Donnell Library Center Auditorium in May.

We were really interested in two things: First, the book. Did it work on paper. It was our opinion that if a song was flawed, it would be more easily replaced than if a character arc didn't work, or if the story line was bad. The second was the collaboration. No show is perfect in its early stages -- perhaps none ever is -- but it was important to us that we be a part of guiding the future of the winning piece in collaboration with the writers. I'll be honest: there are FOUR writers to this show who share equal credit on book, music and lyrics. That was a huge red flag for us: How could we possibly work with four guys day in and day out from May to September?

Well, these four guys -- David Cornue, Sam Holtzapple, Warren Loy and Chris Todd -- are remarkable. They actually LOVE re-writes. Tell them something doesn't work, and they fly into action. They have private BLOGs where they sort out their ideas online. They meet. They talk. They actually seem to LIKE each other.

And, most importantly, they wrote one helluva funny show that managed to sell out its NYMF run in about 24 hours and opened Wednesday night with a set of stunning performances, onstage and off.

I can not tell you how proud I am that these four guys trusted AnyMinuteNow -- itself only two-and-a-half years old -- with their baby and that we brought on a group of people, from a remarkable cast of singing comic actors (a couple of whom were a part of our very first table read back in March) to a director and a group of designers who have no business working for the pittance we're paying them (I mean, read their bios on the NYMF site..... amazing people).

Producing a Showcase -- especially for a festival -- is frustrating. There is never enough money or time to realize each vision to its fullest. But when you have a team of collaborators like mine, headed up by Artistic Directors Edward Juvier and Francis Kelly and director John Ruocco, it's amazing what you can accomplish with a lot of hard work and a couple of clothes hangers.

Hope to see you there!

Visit www.nymf.org for tickets and more information.