Living In The Bonus Round: Music is Healing. Music is Sanity.

Thursday, April 08, 2010

Music is Healing. Music is Sanity.

These TED talks are amazing, but this one got me because it uses all the same terms I've been using in describing how music is more than notes on a page. It's measurably therapeutic.

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Musical Awards and Honors

For the record and to impress our friends and relatives, a partial list of the honors for our musicals "The Big Voice: God or Merman?" and "The Last Session" which I wrote with life partner and playwright Jim Brochu of the recent hit play about Zero Mostel, "Zero Hour".

Best Score, L.A. Drama Critics Circle 1997 & 2003.

Best Musical, L.A. Ovation Awards, 2005.

Best Musical, ADA Awards 2005.

Best Musical Director, ADA Awards 2005.

Best Lead Actor in a Musical nomination. L.A. Ovation Awards 2005.

PFLAG-LA Oscar Wilde Award, 1997 & 2003.

Best Concert of a Musical, Best Original Writing, Desert Theatre League Awards 2005.

Best Theatrical Production nomination, Off-Broadway & L.A. GLAAD Media Awards, 2004.

Best L.A. Theatre Production, GLAAD Media Awards, 1997.

(And thanks from me to all those groups. Prizes are fun. I like prizes.)

More about Steve

Welcome to the Bonus Round. My name is Steve. I'm a songwriter and an AIDS survivor. Currently, I'm helping my partner, Jim, with his new play, running right now in New York, helping with the website, video diaries and keeping him healthy and sane. So, I'm not doing a lot musically at this moment in time.

However, I go out to open mics or sing in any church that will have me. And I'm developing a couple of new pieces, along with revivals of our musicals "The Last Session" and "The Big Voice: God or Merman?"

But this is how this diary started:

I was on my deathbed. I needed a way to let my friends and family know how I was doing, day by day -- and to record my last thoughts before dying.

GeoCities had just come online giving out free websites. So, I created my site in the form of a diary. And soon, I was getting email from all over the world. I began to see it as a way of saying, "Look. I existed. I was here."

Online diary/blogs are not such an amazing idea these days. But back then, when the Net was new, I was one of the first. Only about 1/3 of a college class even had email. (I know because I asked once when I did a presentation.)

Well, I didn't die. In fact, I wrote a musical instead. And I survive. Then another. I even got to star in that one off-Broadway. Then, a couple years ago, I wrote New World Waking, a musical insurrection for peace, which has evolved from a choral/orchestral work to a workshop/master class concert series. And I'm singing live again as my health permits with Amy Coleman from the original Off-Broadway cast of The Last Session, as well as serving as Resident Composer for Christ Church Episcopal in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

The diary has evolved into a mixture of blog, opinion, diary entries, picture galleries, video journals, our online reality show, road trips, and backstage video diaries. Sometimes I update a lot and sometimes it's more like weekly, but I'm here.

(Our first show, not so coincidentally,The Last Session, was about a songwriter recording a "goodbye world" musical letter. Coincidence?)

Feel free to read along, make comments, disagree. Welcome to the Bonus Round, where time speeds up and the prizes are better.