Harvey's Broadway Blog: The Run Has Begun!

Welcome to the debut of a very special new series on BroadwayWorld.com - four time Tony Award-winner Harvey Fierstein's personal MySpace blog of bringing his brand new musical, A Catered Affair to Broadway. We'll be exclusively picking up Harvey Fierstein's blog as he shares his first hand reports from rehearsals, to out-of-town tryouts to Opening Night (and beyond).  A CATERED AFFAIR also features a score by John Bucchino and is being directed by Tony Award-winner John Doyle. Prior to Broadway, the new musical will play at San Diego's Old Globe Theatre beginning September 20th and then hit the Great White Way at the  Walter Kerr Theatre with previews beginning on begin March 25. The cast includes Broadway favorites Faith Prince, Tom Wopat, Harvey Fierstein, Leslie Kritzer and Matt Cavenaugh. Group tickets for the show are now on sale. 

HELLO EVERYBODY!

Sorry that I haven't posted in more than a week, but we've been settling into our run out here at The Old Globe.

It was sad to see our director, producers, all of our designers and support help slowly leave after the opening night but it's just the natural order of things. Now is the time for us to band together as a company and take to the stage giving the audience a great show eight times a week.

As I write this I am glancing at a calendar where I can clearly see that our time out of town is half-over. We'll all be back in less than 5 weeks. Amazing.

And the show is going great. Nightly the audiences come and allow us to take them on our very special journey. We've participated in two "talk-backs" thus-far and it's wonderful to hear the feedback from the audience. They are definitely getting what we are doing and taking it to heart. They talk about having never seen a show quite like this. They talk about the emotional impact it has on them. They talk about the truth of what they are seeing onstage. They even talk about how wiped out they feel after just 95 minutes in the theater. They really seem to come along with us on the roller coaster of emotion that we put up on that stage nightly. I have to tell you, doing A Catered Affair is truly an experience for us onstage. And that seems to cross the footlights for the audience as well.

THE PRESS

I received a request this morning from a newspaper in Staten Island that's doing a story on movies being turned into musicals. They needed to make a fast deadline and so I only had a few minutes to write something out, but sometimes that's the best way to see what you're really thinking. Know what I mean? So, I thought I'd share the paragraph I sent back to that reporter with you:

Adapting a work from one medium to another is sometimes the way to honor the original writer. This was certainly a motivating factor in turning A Catered Affair into a musical. Author of, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore", Chayefsky was a brilliant social dramatist who always had his finger on the pulse of the American soul. In this era of concepts instead of plots and sound bites instead of character development, I felt that presenting the work of a true social realist might remind folks that the theater has the potential to not only entertain but to illuminate and enrich our lives. The standing ovations we are receiving night after night here in San Diego, along with a slew of fan letters, tells me that we are indeed reaching the hearts of our audience.

FUN AND GAMES

So now that the show is "frozen" for this run and we are no longer rehearsing every day we can start having fun in our off hours. Someone made it to Disneyland and brought me back this hat. Here's Leslie Kritzer modeling it in her best Mickey Mouse style.

I took Faith Prince shopping to some of my favorite locations in San Diego. Here she is posing with a wedding dress just proving that we never really leave our work behind.

It was Heather Mac Crea's birthday and stage manager Claudia baked two cakes. Here are Matt Cavenaugh and Katie Klaus presenting the confetti cake.

And with HALLOWEEN fast approaching, we have begun the process of BOOING each other's dressing room spaces backstage. Here is my BOO created for Lori Wilner.

AND here's Kristine Zbornik enjoying a gummy eyeball from the stash.

THE FUTURE

Like I said, the show is frozen here in San Diego but that doesn't mean there aren't a few things we'd like to change and sharpen up for the NY run. So I'm doing a bit of rewriting and prep work for when we get back to the rehearsal studio in NY. Hey, I want this to be the BEST SHOW we can possibly put on. That's why we came out of town first and why we will take some time before opening on Broadway.

But for now we, and our audience, will enjoy A Catered Affair as it is and get everything we can out of performing for the wonderful audiences here. We have only 39 performances to go.

FAREWELL TO BROADWAYWORLD.COM

Many of you read my blogs on MySpace and have for years. Others of you have been catching up with this blog on Broadwayworld.com. It's been great having y'all come along for this ride, but for now, this will be my last blog they carry. Robert tells me that the blog has had more than 300,000 hits. UNBELIEVABLE! I appreciate everyone's interest in our show and certainly hope that you all get a chance to see it. But for now, this is farewell to the blog with all my thanks.

Anyone who wants, of course, can still read my regular blog on MySpace where I mostly talk about shopping and other fun stuff. Feel free to subscribe or just catch it when you're in the mood. I'm not hard to find. Just search for my name.

So to all you wonderful theater lovers at BWW.com - Hasta Luego and to my MySpace readers... More to come soon so...

STAY TUNED!