A great big Broadway Premiere like the one pictured here.....
for "Tarzan" has been my dream for the last twenty-six years. "Skylark" many years ago came very close and now the musical "The Traveling Companion" that I've written with the incredible Tim Doran represents the next best chance that I have. Tim and I have a lot riding on this one. We've scored it for complete orchestra, hired musicians, singers and recording studios and yesterday was another big milestone accomplished as we recorded several new songs from the score. In attendance was my friend of the last eighteen years, Mr.Bill Lewiswho recorded several songs along with David Meinke. Highlights were the songs "Better Do What The Good Book Says", "Wear His Smile" and "Opposites, Opposites". A young singer nmaed Daniel from Tim's choral group at school sounded very promising in the re-casting of the protagonist's songs. Tim and are are finding more and more that singers (even so called professional) are singing nasally and not from the diaphram. Wherever they learned this horrible bad habit, I sure hope it stops. We pay singers and still find that some of them sing with some pretty bad habits in place. But all in all everything went very well with yesterday's recording session. We even managed to record the narration for the storyteller CD and a proposed song for Ritz Cameras called "Capture Your World". I sincerely hope that this musical takes off. It has a really great story and some very hummable tunes. It's based on a classic tale written by the great Hans Christian Andersen. Tim has worked incredibly long to get the score ready. It's an amazing amount of work that few people outside of musical theatre can appreciate. We have made some submissions to various theatres, including the Alliance in Atlanta, but now we need to complete the score and get this storyteller CD out to them as well. Our sincere thanks to our engineer, Mr. Robert Roth. He's a true genius in the recording studio! I notice also this morning the latest Broadway Grosses from June 12th thru the 18th. "Wicked" continues to draw incredible crowds and still maintains 100% capacity. The week in question it made a whopping $1, 365,387.00. The writers including Stephen Schwartz make about 7.5 % of the gross every single week in every single "A" type of professional production! "The Lion King" continues to draw 1oo% capacity as well as does the "Jersey Boys". Believe or not "The Phantom of the Opera" after 18 years on Broadway still is drawing 98.5% capacity or $822,302 last week alone! Tim and I dream of such numbers for us too! Well maybe.. someday!