Recovering from My Annual Winter Musical

For the last 5 years, I've directed a musical during the week between Christmas and New Year's Day.  This is always a fun, rewarding, and exhausting experience for me with my company Immeasurable Productions.

This year, we produced Disney's High School Musical: On Stage.  My sister Mindy (my choreographer) and I chose this musical because it would be a lot of fun and would hopefully encourage a few more light-hearted, fun-loving auditionees to come out for the show.  We're very glad we went with this choice as this was one of the most fun, up-beat, positive casts I've ever directed.

Another new thing that we did this year was ask my wife Christine to be the music director.  Christine did a marvelous job.  Plus, it was pretty cool (for me) to have the core artistic team be all Moritzes.  I was excited to see such a high quality product come from a program we built from scratch.

I'm now trying to think of musicals to consider for next year.  There are several shows I've been interested in doing for years that often appeal to older, experienced cast members (like West Side Story).  But at the same time, the experience has been so good with the younger cast that we had in High School Musical, that there's a part of me that wants to do another cheesy show with a lot of dance numbers and 2-dimensional characters in order to keep attracting these kinds of performers (and perhaps discourage potential divas from auditioning).

Still mulling it over...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Technical Know-How - Continual Forgetting

Image
Yesterday, I met with a friend of mine from a previous company where i worked for 3 years as an Angular developer.  He at a new company now but still working with Angular as the primary tech stack.  I found myself trying to recall a bit of what I knew about Angular... and totally drawing a blank. I was a full-time developer in this technology as recently as 2.5 years ago, and I found I couldn't even remember what the code looked like.  Would i even recognize my own code if i saw it? Similarly, I talked with a friend of mine who is working to learn software engineering, and I told him that I very much enjoyed Vue and found it to be "the most fun" out of the frameworks in which I've written production code: KnockoutJS, AngularJS, Angular (2+), React, Vue, and Ember.  He asked me what makes it the most fun.  I could think of a few things that gave me that impression and gave a passable answer (dynamic attributes, terse syntax, v-if and v-else in the template, etc.), but
Read more

Family Quarantine with COVID-19

We are coming out of a 14-day quarantine at our house. 2 weeks ago, Christine was exposed to a friend of ours who had the virus COVID-19. She tested positive so the whole family needed to quarantine ourselves for a couple weeks. Honestly, I think we all expected that most or maybe all of us would catch the virus. But surprisingly, nobody else caught it.  For Christine, the virus manifested itself with many uncomfortable symptoms such as fatigue and nausea. Thankfully, she never ran a fever. The most distinctive symptom was her loss of smell and taste. At one point, she actually bought some celery to eat because she could not taste any of the delicious food anyway. We are all very thankful that this was overall a pretty mild experience. I am amazed that nobody else in the family caught the virus as far as we know.  But more significantly, I am grateful to God that I am in a family that enjoys each other's company so much. This was not a rough time. It's hard to even say that it
Read more

Daddy Dates

I enjoy taking on new projects.  But when I do, I try hard to maintain balance in my life with my existing priorities.  Sometimes I feel I'm doing a good job, and other times, I feel out of balance.  Often when I feel most balanced, it's because I've taken a little extra care to write down most of the stuff I should be expected to remember. For instance, I've gone through periods where I'll write down everything I intend to do in a given day or I'll make notes of when I've spent time with my wife or how much I weighed each week or what my goals are for the month. Most recently, I've been writing down when I've taken each of my kids out on a private one-on-one date.  I keep a note entitled "Daddy Dates" in a useful program called Evernote that syncs my notes among all of my electronic devices.  I have 5 children (ages 11 - 3), and I can usually fit in about 2 daddy dates per week, so each of the kids can look forward to some alone time w
Read more