Tag: play-writing
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Slicing and Dicing the Script
The musical I’m directing is three weeks away from opening. Today we had our first mega-rehearsal – 8 hours which included two complete run-throughs from start to finish. I know now that I had been over-optimistic about the musical’s length. I was confident that we could get it done in 2.5 hours which would have…
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I’m Writing a Full-Length Musical!
I’m feeling ambitious – or stupid. Only time will settle the duel. I’ve decided to go all out this year and create, from scratch, a full-length, full-blown, Broadway style musical for my dramatic production in May 2014. No, I’m not doing this alone. I’m working with a fun and talented group of motivated high school…
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Self-Assessment: How I Rank My Own Plays
I’ve written or co-written seven full length plays. All of them were a blast to produce and stage, but some of them, in my opinion, have staying power while others I would probably never want to revisit. Why am I contemplating the quality of my plays? Well, my latest one, “Grandparents’ War” finished its limited…
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Writing Comedy: From Page to Rehearsal to Stage
I had the extreme pleasure of watching my new play (co-written with a team of student writers), Grandparents’ War, at its debut the other night. Once the audience shows up and the lights go down, everything changes, and a writer finally gets to see (and hear) if the words he has written resonate off the…
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Drama & Writing
(This post starts an occasional series on the connections I see between writing and teaching or performing drama. As always, your thoughts are appreciated.) Before I get into how working with drama has helped my writing, I’d like to recount how I ended up getting involved in drama. I was a writer that hadn’t written…
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Writing ideas from any place
Have you ever been inspired by a squid? I’m not a fantasy or, really, any genre writer. My novels are realistic human dramas. Fantasy is fine if that is what you like, and I have another post on genre writing coming up, but I just don’t like breaking the laws of this universe in my…
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The Monologue of Nicholas Stewart
In our new soon-to-be-released play “Life with Stewart”, Nicholas Stewart, an aged Hollywood movie star, is asked to deliver again his famous speech as the unforgettable protagonist Wellesly Green from the movie “Surrender has no Tomorrow”. (Of course, all of this is fictional.) So imagine a staggering figure clad in battle gear trying to rally…
Author Mark W Sasse 