I directed and performed in the premier production of Suspension Theatrical Arts, a Millvale-based theater company I co-founded, in June of 2023. A Catastrophic Cabaret was originally conceived as a low-stakes fundraiser event, but quickly became a more ambitious experiment in collaborative storytelling. When we held auditions, we asked auditionees about their goals for growth as artists. Some wanted to try something they’d never done before, others wanted to elevate their art to new levels, and most just wanted to have the creative freedom to enjoy making art again. Our performers each had a diverse set of skills and interests that we fully indulged in the creative process, and then the directing team developed an overarching story and show order that tied all of it together. The result was a one-night-only, play-within-a-play experience tied together with songs, improv sketches, and other chaotic bits and pieces. A Catastrophic Cabaret was an exercise in putting the artistic autonomy of our collaborators first, and it ended up being a really fun night.

In June 2023, I partnered with Lindsey Scherloum and the Brashear Association on Let’s Eat, a multimedia community-action event centered around dispelling stigma around food insecurity in the Hilltop community. Chef Carlos Thomas of Feed the Hood provided a diverse array of health-conscious meals that were distributed on 80 entirely unique ceramic plates, which were handcrafted and fired by Scherloum. Myself and a team of servers I directed delivered these meals to guests in typical three-course fashion and encouraged attendees to share the abundant contents of each plate with their neighbors to reveal the artwork underneath each plate. Servers also read from a script that Scherloum wrote and I refined, recounting stories from Hilltop residents and sharing facts and resources about food insecurity. At the end, attendees and servers alike were encouraged to share their dreams for a more abundant future for their communities. Let’s Eat was my first foray into the nonprofit community action sphere, and it felt pretty darn amazing to use my talents and expertise for such a tangibly good cause.

In the spring of 2021, I was put in touch with Nic Cory, who was directing a radically reimagined La Finta Giardiniera set in Madison Square Garden during the 1970s, in a boxing match reminiscent of the “Fight of the Century” between Mohammad Ali and Joe Frazier. Nic wanted a contemporary supertitle translation of the Italian libretto, and I, a relative outsider to the world of opera, wanted to create an experience that would be entertaining for even the most opera-averse audiences.

My translation was designed to work as either a set of supertitles or a sung-through libretto, as nearly every line is syllable-matched to the original Italian. I did not intend to create a one-to-one translation of Calzabigi’s words, as I tend to believe such a thing is nearly impossible. Translation is about more than words - it is about time, place, culture, and in this case, music as well. I wanted to grapple with the complex themes lying underneath this comic story, and in order to do that, the English lyrics had to dig a little deeper into the characters and situations.

In the fall of 2019, my friends Sammie Paul and Katy Zapanta approached me with an idea to adapt Toni Morrison’s Beloved into a 30-minute musical for CMU’s Playground Festival of Student Work. Katy directed and produced the end product, which was a sort of sequel story that followed a grown-up Denver struggling to raise her own daughter in the same house that the spirit of her older sister once haunted. I wrote an original book for the piece, and Sammie and I wrote music and lyrics for 9 original songs. Click below for rehearsal footage of selections from the show, featuring the talents of Simone Joy Jones, Biola Obatolu, Dylan T. Jackson, Michael Bahsil-Cook, Kevin Tappan, and Chloe Brown.

Where do we go when we die? How do we know if we’ve lived a “good” life or a “bad” one? At the end of the day, who gets to judge us and the way we spend our time on Earth? All these questions and more arose when I became immersed in the sensory world of Dante Alighieri’s epic poem, “The Divine Comedy.” For several years, I have been developing a modern musical reimaging of this classic tale, in which the Roman poet Virgil, condemned to the gray and soulless land of Limbo as his eternal resting place, is tasked by an angel with escorting a living man named Dante through the nine circles of Inferno, teaching him the dangers of sin and guiding him towards virtue. In Limbo, I seek to bring a little modern thought to Dante’s more classical interpretation of good and evil. What if Dante wasn’t the only one in this story who could change his own fate?

Click below for a video of the first workshare, featuring selections from Act 1. Credits in the link.