Acting in ShortLived Finals, August 3-5

Andrew Chung as Borkul the Orc and me as Elanil the Elf. Photo courtesy PianoFight.

Hey, remember how in mid-June, I was performing in the first weekend of PianoFight's audience-judged short play competition, ShortLived?

Well, the play I'm in—"All the Worlds are Stages" by Ruben Grijalva—won that round handily, so we're competing again in the finals this weekend! The whole team from June is coming back with dreams of glory: director Alejandro Emmanuel Torres and actors Andrew Chung, Tony Cirimele, and Danielle Doyle.

The championship-round performances, which feature the winning plays from all six weekends plus two "wild cards," are selling out fast. If they haven't all gone, you can get tickets here. Shows are Thursday through Saturday at 7 PM, with an additional Friday show at 9:30.

ShortLived has been getting some nice press, too—some of which uses the above production photo of me and Andrew:

• "ShortLived playwriting contest off to great start," by Leslie Katz for the San Francisco Examiner
• "At Bay Area's PianoFight, Anything Goes and Everyone Plays," by Sam Hurwitt for American Theatre (this means that I have now had my photo in American Theatre twice, once in a bedsheet toga and once in elf ears)

for American Theatre: "School of Rock" & School of Wizardry

Two months left in 2016 and, as the holiday where we celebrate the undead and otherworldly approaches, I am attempting to raise this old blog from the dead (and catch up on posts that I meant to write this year).

Perhaps my biggest news is that I have started to contribute on a freelance basis to American Theatre's website!

In April, I reported on the first-ever youth production of School of Rock: The Musical, presented by Oakland School of the Arts at the historic Curran Theatre in San Francisco.

And, in September, I wrote a "Critic's Notebook" piece on the script of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, analyzing its affinity to nineteenth-century melodrama.

(I am convinced that being paid money to write about Harry Potter is a Millennial-writer rite of passage.)

Bonus link: the relationship between Oakland School of the Arts and the Curran is still going strong, as evidenced by this recent Curran-produced video of the OSA students singing their a cappella arrangement of "Ring of Keys" (which I briefly mentioned in my American Theatre article).