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.