Introduction

Welcome to my blog: Curtain Up! Light The Lights!

My name is Jon Rosen, and some of you may already know me (from being friends and/or family, from theatrical productions we may have worked on together, from Facebook or other myriad social media sites that I belong to).  Or maybe you just stumbled on this blog and don't know me from Adam!  

In either case, welcome aboard and I am excited to share this journey through the amazing world of local as well as regional and national musical theater that I am both a contributor to and a huge fan of (and please no comments on the dangling prepositions!)  I hope you will enjoy the ride and I look forward to not only providing you with my $.67 worth of input on various local productions and musical theater news from around the country (and maybe even the world) but also getting feedback from you on where you agree with me, and also where you disagree with me (that is welcome too!)  

The [title of blog] :-)

As a bit of trivia, you either already know (or will in about 150 microseconds) that my blog title comes from the first verse of the song Everything's Coming Up Roses from Gypsy! Gypsy is one of my favorite musicals for many reasons (I may elaborate on this in a later post) and these words are prophetically sung by Louise's (Gypy's) Mama Rose as she prepares to figure out how to make Louise a star after being abandoned by her other daughter, Louise's sister June.  These words just felt like some of the best words to define a blog about musical theater productions because virtually every show ever performed starts with "curtain up, light the lights!"  (Of course these days, more and more shows are done without a curtain, but fortunately, except for shows done outdoors, lights will probably be required for a long time to come!)

Until Next Time...

It seems standard to use an early blog post to provide a little background for your audience and explain where you come from, what brought you here and what you are planning on doing with your blog.  I will leave that exercise until next time, but I hope you do come back and before long, we will be plunging into the world of musical theater, both big and small, and hopefully having a great time along the way.  

Introduction

It seems that a common first blog post is to provide a little background for your audience and explain what you are going to be doing with your blog.  So here goes nothing!

My Background

My name is Jon Rosen and I am the product of a very long and interesting upbringing in musical theater.  My mother has been an actress and director through various parts of her adult life (at 88, she continues to direct shows at her senior community at Del Webb's Sun City in Bluffton, South Carolina!)  I saw my first musicals before I was 10, and I was in my first local community theater musical production, Damn Yankees, as a member of the Chevy Chase Fan Club ("You gotta have heart!") when I was 12.  My brother got his degree in theater and after doing a short stint in summer stock (where he met his wife Sophie who is a relatively acclaimed Broadway actress in her own right with a Tony nomination for Best Actress in the musical revival of Most Happy Fella, as well as a featured performance with George Hearn and Natalie Portman in the revival of The Diary of Anne Frank as Mrs. Edith Frank), he first became an agent and then opened a company, the Actors' Information Project, which provided support for newly arrived hopeful actors in New York City (he is now the head of corporate fund raising for New York University).  

I took a slightly different professional turn, and have spent most of my adult life as a software developer, manager or quality assurance engineer (I currently work for Datera, a start-up company in Mountain View as a lead QA engineer).  But my passion for theater has always been there, and for the past 20 years, I have worked in varying degrees as a producer, director, lighting designer, grant writer, stage manager, pianist, carpenter, general jack-of-all-trades theater rat and even occasionally as an actor all over the Bay area from Santa Cruz to San Francisco.  I even produced and directed a show in Raleigh, North Carolina in 2008 when I took a one year leave of the West Coast.

I have worked on shows as varied as HAiR, Bye Bye Birdie, The Fantasticks, The Mouse That Roared, You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Fiddler on the Roof and Nunsense A-Men (the all male version of the famous comic musical about the Little Sisters of Hoboken).  

I have a collection of CDs and downloads from over 300 shows, and I have to admit I spend most of my time listenting to music deeply involved in Broadway and off-Broadway musicals.