Christmas in Connecticut to launch at Goodspeed Musicals (pinch me!)
Up until recently I hadn’t put much stock in the idea of manifesting. The practice of thinking aspirational thoughts with the purpose of making them real seemed way too woo-woo. But because of a recent turn of events I gotta say I might now be a convert.
In early 2020, my writing partner and BFF Patrick Pacheco and I secured the rights to the Warner Bros. holiday classic Christmas in Connecticut. We quickly brought in Jason Howland to write music and Amanda Yesnowitz on lyrics. That was our second bit of great good luck—the first had been landing producer Peter Schneider (The Lion King) and getting a commission from Broadway Licensing to commence our work.
We on the writing team put our heads together about where we’d ideally love to see the piece debut and decided the ultimate kick-off would be Goodspeed Musicals. One of America’s finest regionals, Goodspeed is a storied venue that has been the launching pad for 19 Broadway transfers (Annie and Man of La Mancha among them). And in addition to the theater’s killer cred and ace staff, there would be the lovely meta aspect of a Christmas musical set in Connecticut actually playing at Christmastime in the actual Connecticut.
A few weeks later, when the pandemic effectively shuttered the entire theater industry, our musing suddenly felt like nothing but a pipe dream. But we didn’t lose faith. We kept working, finding welcome escape in the story of star magazine columnist Liz Lane (Barbara Stanwyck in the movie), a famous expert on marriage, cooking and homemaking, who’s asked by her publisher to host a war hero for Christmas dinner at her rustic Connecticut farmhouse. The only problem? She can’t cook, she isn’t married and she lives in a tiny New York apartment. For the writers, being able to immerse ourselves in the nostalgia, romance and farce of the story provided some respite from the fear and uncertainty of those long months.
Lo and behold, when the world finally reopened, several theaters were tentatively interested in premiering the show. They wanted to hear it out loud before committing, so we booked a table reading for December 2021… which the Omicron variant promptly squashed. A second attempt a month later went off without a hitch. All the right people must have been in the room—not the least of which was a terrific cast—because a couple of days later, Goodspeed gave the green light. The moment I received that news I felt, in the words of the story’s beloved Uncle Felix, exquisitely ”hunky dunky.” Martinis were consumed.
Now, I’m thinking a little differently about this notion of mapping out exactly what you want in advance. Like, going ahead and writing it all down in detail. Because who knows? Maybe the universe is indeed listening. Or maybe it’s just a fan of screwball comedies and musical theater. Either way, I hope you’ll be able to come join the fun when the show kicks off at Goodspeed Musicals in East Haddam, Connecticut, on November 18. Click here for tickets and info.
Sign up for my mailing list at the bottom of this page and I’ll keep you updated (sparingly, I promise) with news on the show and other projects.
The January table read at
NYC’s Ripley Grier studios