Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Hanging with the Cougar Lady

I invited Donna Moore, the creator of COUGAR THE MUSICAL to see JULIA & BUDDY and she came, daughter in tow. I saw her after the show and she said that my play really gave her something to think about, which I consider the highest of compliments.

Although I wrote about the experience of seeing her show, I really didn't know that much about Donna, although she knows my friends Valerie David and Kitty Hendrix. So I was amazed and impressed when I found out, just recently that Donna had been one of the kids on Zoom! I guarantee I saw the episodes that Donna was on when they were first aired - I'm just about Donna's age. It is a small world after all.



I asked Danny Bernardy, who played all the guy roles in COUGAR to play Buddy in my show, but he wasn't available for the full run. Which is perhaps just as well - someone who knows Danny's work and saw Matt DeCapua play the role said in her opinion Matt was actually the better choice for the role.

I certainly can't imagine that Danny could have played the Schopenhauer part as well as Matt. One of my ambitions for J&B was that people would look at their programs to see who was playing Schopenhauer because they weren't sure it was the same guy playing Buddy. The actors and stage manager scoffed at the idea when I mentioned it during rehearsals but sure enough, for the last performance a coworker friend of mine who came to see the show admitted he wasn't sure, at least at the beginning of the Schopenhauer scene, that it was the same actor. VICTORY!

As I blogged before, I did like COUGAR much more than I expected I would. And I'm also extremely impressed that Donna was able to create a successful show as she did. She's promised to let me take her  out for drinks and ask her for tips on how to be a success in this business we call show.