When I was 18, my mother bought me a piano for my birthday. I had no idea where it would take me, but where it has taken me is far beyond what I could have imagined. 

Fast forward to 1997, when I saw a play called Lost Labor’s Loved by a young verse playwright by the name of Kirk Wood Bromley at Todo Con Nada on Ludlow Street, in the East Village, NYC. It was, to say the least, a revelation and would alter the course of my life in many significant ways.

Since joining the company in 2004 (after saying 'Yes' to Kirk asking me to "marry him in the artistic world") the majority of my focus as a composer has gone towards providing the music for Kirk’s plays and it has been as fun and challenging a journey as one could have as a composer. The joy of bringing Kirk's lyrics to life (which are, in my opinion, already music) has been one of the most satisfying artistic experiences of my life. 

Fast forward to 2024. After a 10-year hiatus from writing music, I received a call from Kirk asking if I would be interested in composing the score for a play called The Burnt Woman of Harvard that he had written and produced before my tenure for an audiobook series he was putting together of his prolific canon of work. This audiobook series - he later shared with me - would also include the many plays he and I had worked on together... and all of the music, too.

The funny part is, he thought he needed to convince me. He didn’t. As far as I was concerned, we were still married.

The first play in the series to have music written and recorded is a one-man show called Remission which Kirk had written for, and about, Daniel Martin Berkey – a phenomenal actor… and former schizophrenic. To say this play was a challenge to work on would be an understatement - both the original production, and the audiobook version - because the music had to be schizophrenic as well in order to properly underscore the thoughts and visions and voices in Daniel's head... while still telling the larger story. That said, I had always wanted to create a soundscape that reflected what it might sound like inside the brain - thoughts racing, synapses firing, the amygdala scanning and calculating, etc. 

What better subject than the mind of a post-schizophrenic actor with an ability to tell his story with such grace, and humor – and in verse?! 

In the end, the result is… an event. I cannot adequately describe it in words. It’s the kind of thing one simply has to experience in real time.

After The Burnt Woman of Harvard was well on its way, the next play to have new music composed for it was Kirk’s 1999 epic The American Revolution, which I knew and loved - and even played a small role as the drummer of the “Rebel Mess”, Tom Dodge, on Governers Island once (filling in for my buddy - actor/musician - John Mconnell). The opportunity to compose new music for these plays has been very exciting, and fulfilling, and also a bit daunting, in that I knew I would be following in the footsteps of other notable composers who have written music for Kirk’s plays over the decades – including Robert Lopez, Marc Hollmann, and the late, great, Jessica Grace Wing.

As I was writing the music for these extraordinarily plays, I began recording songs from two of our earlier works: The Banger's Flopera - A Musical Perversion, and a play called ME. 

The Banger's Flopera, which premiered at The Village Gate in 2004, is a raunchy, bombastic rock musical based on The Beggar's Opera by John Gay (the 18th century play that also inspired Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera) which takes place in modern day New York City – or, as it is called in the play, "The Shitty of New Yuck". This was the first musical I had ever written, and the first play Kirk and I worked on together as lyrcist & composer... and it was a doozy. I had written a series of songs for Kirk's previous play On the Origin of Darwin for acoustic guitar, but this was a whole other level with regard to scope, styles, and the amount of songs involved (we started with sixteen, which quickly turned into twenty-three). 

ME is a magical, musical, mystical play that had its premiere at the original Ohio Theater in NYC in 2008 ("The most important new play of the season." - nytheatre.com). It's about Kirk, and all of us, and vacillates between a series of auto-biographical scenes (with thirteen actors all playing a version of Kirk) and a Chinese folktale about a young couple who gives birth to a dolphin named "Baiji" who's sole/soul mission is to save the world from humanity. The original production was exquisite. I played piano, acoustic guitar, and percussion (mostly for the fight scenes, and inspired by "The Matrix" – which I told Keanu Reeves when he came to see the show one night). That said, the opportunity to revisit these songs and record them from the bottom up has allowed me to explore orchestrations and work with musicians I did not have the luxury of doing during the original production and it has been, without question, some of the most fun I've had recording my music - or any music, for that matter.

I'm extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to sink my musical teeth into all of these plays – not only because they are some of the most beautiful plays ever written, but because they’ve yielded some of my best work as an artist, and some of my favorite artistic relationships... far beyond what I could have ever imagined.