On April 14, 15, and 16 the opera “Ghosts” will have its world premiere at the Balboa Theatre in San Diego. “Ghosts” is a collection of three one-act operas, of which I wrote one of the libretti.
I expect this production will be a bittersweet one. Nicolas Reveles, who composed the music, passed away earlier this year. Nic was a brilliant artist, educator, and a true friend. To see “Ghosts” on stage will be a tribute to his memory.
You can read more about “Ghosts” on the SD Opera website.
Around Christmas, 2020, right as we were coming out of lockdown and looking forward to a vaccine, my husband Patricio was diagnosed with cancer. Thus began the most difficult and painful experience of my life. It was a six-month struggle, ending with his death on June 27, 2022.
Patricio was my biggest fan, always supporting my writing and bringing his many friends and family to my shows. He made it possible for me to have a career in writing for the stage.
couple goals
If you never met him, you missed one of the brightest personalities the world has known. Visit Legacy.com to read his tribute.
After Patricio left, it was difficult to live in the city that we had shared for a decade and a half. So I decided that I needed to say goodbye to San Diego and put the past behind me.
Where to go? If I’m going to pursue theatre seriously, then there’s really only one option: New York. (Okay, I considered London, but now’s not the best time to be an undocumented refugee.)
It took me almost exactly one year of hard work, putting our affairs in order, tying up loose ends. I even gave up my dog, Mathilde. But after months of stretching myself thin, on June 24 I boarded a Delta 747 and flew one-way to JFK.
I have accepted the Chrysler Building as my personal lord and savior.
And now I’m here in the big city. Several projects are in the queue. First up: a full-length musical, working title: “Alan Turing & the Queen of the Night.” Think of it as a queer fantasy, a big wild spectacle, operatic and epic in scale. I’ve finished a draft of the book, and now I’m on the hunt for a brilliant composer.
(If you’re a songwriter, drop me a line. I want to hear from you!)
And so that is my status as of the summer of 2022. I went through hell to get here, but now that I have arrived, I’m more excited than ever. Cue Mama Rose: “You’ll be swell, you’ll be great! Gonna have the whole world on a plate!”
Thanks for being part of my adventure.
My latest work is a full-length musical comedy, “Don’t Get Caught.”
The FBI’s best informer is an undocumented man named Javier. He’s a genius at keeping secrets, including his sexuality. But when Javier's down-low boyfriend finds out what Javier's up to, he offers to marry Javier and get a green card. Will Javier find the courage to stop keeping secrets and live out in the light?
This project has been a labor of love for the last two years. It really started with a series of conversations I had with my in-laws in which they shared their stories about immigrating the United States. Some of those stories they hadn’t told anyone.
When the first composer dropped off the project, Nicolas Prada stepped in like a champ. He’s a classically trained composer from Columbia, and he brought a deep knowledge of Latin rhythms that informs the score. I like the way he pieces together some popular beats with the old-fashioned sounds like those of Oscar Hammerstein.
We were finishing our first draft when Covid struck. I knew there would be no way to stage this thing anytime soon. Or even a decent workshop. So we pivoted to video.
I got coached by Ken Davenport and his people. I got some amazing advice from Gabriel Stelian-Shanks at the Drama League. My good friend DJ Rich Alex helped me with mixing the demo tracks. And Makena Metz stepped in to direct the Zoom reading.
“Don’t Get Caught” will get its first real audience on Thursday, October 1 at 7pm PST. Here is the Zoom link for you to join us:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83273686042
But we’re not done yet. After the show I will be raising money and building a producers community to bring this show to life. I will be recruiting a good dramaturg to collaborate with me on tuning up the dialogue and making the book as strong as it can be.
My goal is to raise enough money to hire a professional orchestrator and convert our piano sheet music into a complete score for a four- or five-piece ensemble. We want that big guitarrón sound!
And that’s what’s happening behind the scenes of “Don’t Get Caught.” To everyone who has supported me throughout this adventure — thank you!
Nicolas put on a concert of his compositions over the last decade or so. The headliner was a complete sing-through of our opera, “Take Care of Him,” with Nic himself pulling off a Herculean effort on piano. Mezzo-soprano Susana Poretsky sang the role of Yadira with some serious gravitas.
Is “Take Care of Him” scary? I think so? But it’s hard for me to tell, I’ve been so close to the text for so long. Also, I don’t have a deep background in the genre. We weren’t allowed to watch horror movies when I was a kid. I didn’t see the Exorcist until I was twenty-something. So I’m never sure how well this libretto stands up against the standards people expect from a horror movie.
Last night’s audience certainly felt the tension. The more I think about it, the more I prefer the feeling of menace and creeping dread (like in Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar) much more than the easy surprise-scares or the gore of a monster movie. And like Aster’s movies, TCoH deals with the post-traumatic stress of the nuclear family — or in this case, the people we pay to replace our family.
If creeping dread is the measure, then yeah I think “Take Care of Him” does succeed.
The best part was sitting next to my husband and watching him recognize all the many in-jokes that he and I share, which I sprinkled generously throughout.
Of course I heard a dozen phrases that embarrassed me, and I can’t wait to rewrite them. Fortunately the score isn’t set in concrete yet, so I still have time to iron out the words that hurt my ears.
I have formally joined the Dramatists Guild.
One more step up the ladder.
I wrote my first opera libretto. It’s called “Take Care of Him,” and it’s a story of an elderly man who mistreats the woman who looks after him. She gets her son to kill him. Except the old man won’t die.
The composer is Nicolas Reveles, recently retired from San Diego Opera. Nic played and sang the whole thing through for me for the first time last week. He knocked me over — this stuff is intense!
The libretto is “done,” but opera is never really done-done. There’s still orchestration to do, and we’re picking singers to learn the roles so we can pitch it to opera companies. But for now it’s a pretty big victory of which I’m very proud.
Since last summer I’ve been working on a new musical.
It’s a story about a guy from Mexico who is undocumented. He’s able to stay in the USA by working as an informer for the FBI. And then he meets a gringo and falls in love.
The composer’s name is Ian Brandon. He’s done some work on the West End, and I like his style. Mostly old-school traditional show tunes, the kind with which I was reared. With an occasional bit of flair.
It still doesn’t have a perfect title. I hate giving titles to things I write — it always reminds me of when I was an ad copywriter and everything had to be cute or a pun or a play on words or else the audience *gasp* might not click the gold button.
At first we played with the idea of doing an 80s-synth pop sound, since that’s a decade of music that Ian and I share in common. We thought about calling it “New Romantics,” but that title never really inspired me much (and we ditched the synth-pop stuff anyway.)
So now that it’s almost done, what do we call this thing?
I produced a showcase of monologues. We called it “Erratic — a night of oddball monologues,” and somehow an audience appeared out of nowhere.
The performers were some of my favorite people. Vanessa Dinning did a piece by Dame Emma Thompson. Steve Oberman performed an excerpt from his new play. And Markuz Rodriguez and Romo gave us a scene from their very cute play “Ocurrr.” I got to play host, MC, and do an old Buddy Cole bit from my youth.
Escapism SD is the perfect space. It belongs to my good friend Tangerine (who has an amazing eye for set design) and it’s way up overlooking Fourth Street, so the view and the noise makes it feel like you’re in a real city.
Since Erratic was such a hit, we’re planning to make this a regularly recurring thing.
On Friday, February 15, the Scripteasers will host an unstaged reading of my newest play, “About the Dead Mothers.”
You can find the details on Scripteasers’ Facebook event page here.
After Trudy’s death, her daughter and widower meet in the garage to decide what to throw out and what to keep. There’s a knock at the door — and in walks Trudy. Dad is overjoyed to see his wife returned in the flesh. Their daughter is skeptical, accusing this strange woman of impersonating her mother.
It’s not a musical.
I wrote this play super quickly, in a few sittings last Fall. It's definitely the fastest I’ve ever gone from draft to sharing with the public. I really want to see how people react before I start submitting it to theatres all over.
