Earlier this year, I was in a freight elevator, of all places, when I got a phone call from my agent.

At the time (and, well, to this day), I was still getting used to this kind of thing (agents, not elevators), because it hadn’t been long since I’d spent my days wondering who these “people” were who would get “phone calls” from their “agents” about their “careers.”


Anyway, I was in this freight elevator, and I got this phone call from my agent, who said that Roundabout Theatre Company was going to produce my musical, Ordinary Days.

I’m pretty sure I looked like this:



Only I was wearing clothes at the time and don’t have red hair.

Now, I’ve watched enough episodes of “Mythbusters” to know that jumping up and down while in an elevator is probably a bad idea.  So I contained my excitement and waited til I was out on the solid concrete sidewalks of midtown Manhattan before leaping into the air at the news of my first professional production in New York City.



(I do own red pajamas and am half-Asian, so this photo is actually pretty accurate.)

But to really tell the story of my roundabout way to Roundabout Theatre Company, I’ve got to take you, dear reader, back even farther than this year, because in the most surreal and wonderful way, this production of Ordinary Days is something of a homecoming for me.



When I graduated from college, I did what most newly-minted college graduates do:  I went to Israel.  (The other half?  Jewish, natch.)



And after riding some camels and digging for ancient pottery in the desert, I came back to New York and started interning at, you guessed it: Roundabout Theatre Company.

It wasn’t long before I got hired to work at Roundabout full-time, as an associate in the development office.

All the while, I found I’d been bitten by this musical-writing bug (it is a very colorful insect), and when I got a grant to go work on a new project, I took the leap and left Roundabout to see where this crazy writing thing would take me.

And that new project was…not Ordinary Days.  (There’s no such thing as overnight success in the theater, people.)  The grant ran out, and I took another day job, but I kept on writing.  Eventually I did start writing Ordinary Days (it’d be very difficult to be here blogging about it if I hadn’t) and, last year, the show was featured in a showcase produced by the National Alliance for Musical Theater, or, as it’s more commonly known, NAMT.



The NAMT showcase is kind of like EPCOT for musicals, and not just because they both involve acronyms.  It’s like EPCOT because producers and artistic directors from across the country come to it every year to check out a sampling of brand-new musicals—they can wander from one musical to the next, each with its own special flavor, like so many Norways or Chinas or Uzbekistans.  (I haven’t been to EPCOT in awhile.)

And long story short, some folks from Roundabout came to see Ordinary Days, and I guess liked it enough to program it into this season at Roundabout Underground.

So this production is something of a homecoming for me; I never imagined that the crazy writing thing I left Roundabout to do would lead me right back to where I started!  If you’ve been a Roundabout supporter for a few years, chances are, back in the day, I took down your RSVP to a playreading, or sent you a letter thanking you for your donation, or, perhaps, even called you when your credit card was declined.

The funny thing is, is that Ordinary Days is all about these moments of connection we’re not aware of, about how life criss-crosses itself in all kinds of strange, beautiful ways.

But we’ll get to all that later.

In the meantime, enjoy reading this blog, where I’ll try to document the process of putting up a new musical and hopefully give you an inside glimpse into the world of Ordinary Days!

Comments

1. David Umbach Says:
   August 12th, 2009 at 2:57 pm

   I look forward to hearing more about the process of mounting your musical on your blog. Having mounted many musicals, myself (not often originals), I’m always interested in other people’s experiences. And of course, I intend to attend you show.

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