Ken Ludwig will direct a reading of his new comedy thriller The Game’s Afoot (Or Holmes for the Holidays) for the Kennedy Center’s Ninth Annual Page to Stage Festival in Washington, D.C., on September 6 in the Terrace Theater. Set to star Tony nominee Marc Kudisch and Nancy Robinette, this comedy thriller is described as containing "double-crosses, triple-crosses, gunplay, murder, lies, deceit, disguise, and sex. What do you expect? They’re actors." Ken recently answered a few questions about his new twist on the Sherlock Holmes story.

Can you tell us a little bit about your new mystery play The Game’s Afoot (Or Holmes for the Holidays)?

What I started to do was look at writing a Sherlock Holmes play. There have been hundreds of such pastiches over the years and they've sometimes been moderately successful – but we've seen so many of them in movies, plays, books, and short stories that the whole genre felt a little old to me. So instead I ended up writing a play about the actor who created Sherlock Holmes on stage (William Gillette). The basic premise of the play is that Gillette has invited the cast of his Broadway play Sherlock Holmes to his home in Connecticut (all totally historically accurate), and a murder takes place during the weekend party. Gillette resolves to solve the mystery, and in doing so he sort of becomes Holmes. I came up with this basic premise years ago and wrote a first mystery play based on this idea called Postmortem. I always wanted to take another a crack at it with a whole new mystery and a whole new set of characters at the core.

When and why did you write it?

I have a specific answer to that. Last year I was in London for a couple of weeks with my family and we did every fun thing in the city imaginable. Then, on the plane trip home, I asked my two kids what they liked best about the vacation and they said, with one voice, “going to see The Mousetrap!” So I thought hmmm … here’s this wonderful comedy-mystery still playing in the West End after 56 years and it’s still delighting audience. Why not try one. I came home and wrote it over Christmas.

The lead character is based on the actor William Gillette, who is famously known for playing Sherlock Holmes onstage. What made him infamous, however, was building a sort of extreme castle on the Connecticut River, and this castle is the setting of your play. Have you visited it?

I have! It's zany and funny, and a great visit. What a bizarre, self-confident thing to do. Say you’re a successful Broadway actor and you want to build a new house. Connecticut, yes. Big, yes. But a reproduction of a European castle complete with crenellated battlements? Yes, theatre-people are different.

You tend to write about actors and the theatre quite often…

Very much so. For me, somehow, the theatre has become a way of looking at the whole world in microcosm. There are triumphs and tragedies and family quarrels and family celebrations. There are love affairs and marriages and children and careers. Being in the theatre has given me so many families to enjoy. I was reminded of this when I came back to the Tony Awards recently. I don’t live in New York, so I don’t see my theatre friends as often as some people do: but this was like old home week. Dozens of friends came up to me and we caught up on our families and careers and our whole lives. The theatre is a place of love, and to reconnect like that is just heartwarming. It’s why I write so much about the theatre and it’s why I’m in the theatre.

Following the Tony-nominated revival of Lend Me a Tenor on Broadway, Ken Ludwig will debut his new play, A Fox On the Fairway, opening on October 12, at the Signature Theatre in Washington, DC. Directed by Tony Award winner John Rando (Urinetown), this madcap tribute to the great English high comedies of the 1930s and 1940s takes audiences to a private country club where mistaken identities and romantic entanglements—along with an over-the-top golf tournament—abound. Ken recently answered some questions about writing A Fox On the Fairway revealing why he loves British comedy, the process of creating comic characters, and why he tends to write happy endings.

Since your new play, A Fox On the Fairway, is a tribute to high comedies of the 1930s and 40s, what are your favorites from that era?

Some of my favorite light comedies from that period include A Cuckoo in the Nest and Rookery Nook, two of the “Aldwych farces” by Ben Travers. They’re called that because they were part of a series of farces that played at the Aldwych Theatre in London during the 1930s. Another of the farces in this series, Plunder, was a huge hit for the National Theatre when it was revived about 30 years ago. Other plays of this era that I love include When We Are Married by J.B. Priestley and See How They Run by Philip King. The greatest comedies of this period, in my opinion, are Coward’s Private Lives and Blithe Spirit and the Kaufman and Hart classics You Can’t Take It With You and The Man Who Came To Dinner. All of these plays are textbook examples of pure stagecraft at its best.

A Fox On the Fairway has the same feel as the high comedies of eras past, but it’s actually modern in both setting and humor...

I very consciously set it in modern times. Most of my plays are set in the past—often in the 30s sometimes in the 50s. These were periods that we envision as more trouble-free than our own and therefore more conducive to stories and characters who are happily crazed but less neurotic than characters we associate with modern comedies. I thought it would be fun to take this genre and try to apply it to our own day and age. The tricky part was coming up with a setting and I asked myself: where do we feel most trouble-free in the modern world? It seemed to me that a country club was a fair answer. We go there to get away from our troubles and relax and have a good time. And of course country clubs are riddled with social conventions and hierarchies, which are the backbone of good comedy.

Two of the lead characters in the play, Bingham and Pamela, have fantastic banter. Did you have anyone in mind when writing that dialogue?

I certainly had a certain type of comic character [in mind]. Bingham has a touch of Basil Fawlty of “Fawlty Towers” in him. He's a bit starchy and “British” in type—at least before he’s pushed to extremes by the situation. In many ways, that’s my favorite type of comic character to write about. It's a character of social pretensions; it gives you a framework to try to knock down. Saunders is like that in Lend Me A Tenor. And George Hay in Moon Over Buffalo. And even Leo in Leading Ladies. As for Pamela, she is also part of a long comic line for me. The Carol Burnett/Lynn Redgrave/Joan Collins role (Charlotte Hay) in Moon Over Buffalo is the beginning of the line for me. It’s a comic type that was historically a character part, not the lead, but I’ve brought her center stage for many of my plays. In A Fox On The Fairway, the character of Louise is also in a long line of roles that I’ve loved writing. She’s in the same family as Audrey in Leading Ladies and Lydia Lansing in Shakespeare in Hollywood —young, strong females who are madly attractive to young men and have a unique, innocent but surprisingly clever way of looking at the world.

Bingham and Pamela are older and wiser, and they are juxtaposed to two characters that are younger and still unformed. The characteristics of both sets of duos seem to intermingle throughout the course of the play. Was this intentional?

Absolutely. The play is really about love – and the joys and angst and craziness of love—in two different eras of our life. One is in the first blush of youth when we’re in our early 20s; and the other is when we have a second chance at life in our mid—40s. The second moment is represented by one couple: the seemingly-starchy director of the country club (Henry Bingham), and a sophisticated seen-it-all member of the club, Pamela, two people who, in the course of the play, reconnect after twenty years of just missing each other. The younger moment in the play is represented by a second couple: Bingham’s new assistant, Justin, a sort of walking, good-natured train-wreck who is desperately in love with one of the waitresses at the club’s tap room. In the comic context of the play, when the world starts falling apart (as it always does in some way in a comedy) the older couple revert to their sexually-charged post-pubescent selves, while the younger set just try to cope with crisis after crisis. By the end, as in the high comedies of the 1930s and 40s, it is desperation that fuels the comedy. And of course it’s always when we think we have our lives in good shape and cared for that they start falling apart, which is at the root of the comic impulse.

High comedies tend to have happy endings, as do many of your plays. Is this something you strive for in your work?

The author Louis Kronenberger had a wonderful thing to say about comedy: “Comedy is not just a happy as opposed to an unhappy ending, but a way of surveying life so that happy endings must prevail.” I try to create worlds where we can ultimately see some sanity and worth in our existence. I try to push the ball towards a sense of hope and belief in the humanity of our neighbors. In that kind of world there will be a happy endings because, as Kronenberger says, it’s a natural result of that way of looking at life.

It’s been nothing but joy having Lend Me A Tenor revived on Broadway. And that joy has come in many guises.

One of the best parts of the process has been working with a new cast of such high caliber. Tony Shalhoub, Jan Maxwell, Justin Bartha, Anthony LaPaglia, Jennifer Laura Thompson, Mary Catherine Garrison, Brooke Adams and Jay Klaitz: how lucky is that? Noël Coward famously assembled a remarkable group of actors for his historic revival of Hay Fever at the National Theater in London in 1964 and remarked that they could read the Albanian Telephone Directory and people would come. I contend that my cast of Lend Me A Tenor could read the plumbing section of the Albanian Telephone Directory and people would come. So deal with it, Noël.

Another great joy of this revival has been the flood of memories it has evoked of the earliest productions of the play twenty years ago. Lend Me A Tenor began life (under its original title, Opera Buffa) at a summer theatre, The American Stage Festival, in Milford, New Hampshire. The play was wonderfully directed by Larry Carpenter and it starred the great actor-director Walter Bobbie as Max. (Walter has since directed my adaptation of Twentieth Century with Alec Baldwin and Anne Heche at the Roundabout Theatre as well as this little production of Chicago I’ve heard about …) Also in the cast of that first summer theatre production was the remarkable Ron Holgate as Tito. Ron went on to star as Tito in the London and Broadway productions of Tenor and he remains, to this day, one of the miracles of American Musical Comedy.

Soon after the summer theatre production, I met an English director named David Gilmore who was visiting the United States. He happened to see a production of my play Sullivan and Gilbert that was being produced at the time by the Kennedy Center, and as we discussed it, he asked me casually what else I had written lately. I told him about Lend Me A Tenor and he took a copy home to England with him.

A few days later David called me from his home in Wimbledon and said that he had enjoyed the
play, would like to direct it and, moreover, would like to show it to a “producer friend” of his. I remember thinking at the time, “If I just hand this play over to David he’s going to think I don’t have any real connections of my own and that I don’t know how to deal in big-time theatre circles.” With this imbecilic notion in my head, as though my brain had been invaded by some alien species with the ability to make humans stupid at a moment’s notice, I said “Well, David, I don’t know… I don’t want the play to look shopped around. I do have interest from some big-time producers. Who’s your friend?” To which he answered, “Andrew Lloyd Webber.”

Fortunately, the aliens from the Planet Idiot left my brain as quickly as they had entered and I said calmly, “Well that’s nice. Why don’t we show it to him.”

Two days later, the telephone rang and an English voice came over the line and said, “How do you do? This is Andrew Lloyd Webber. You don’t know me.” I said that I had, in fact, heard of him and was delighted to be speaking with him. He then said that he thought that Lend Me A Tenor was the funniest play he’d ever read and asked me if I had licensed the performance rights to anyone else yet. I said no. He asked if he could acquire them. I said yes. And that was that.
Two weeks later, I found myself on a plane to London. Within an hour of landing, I joined Andrew and his friend Richard Stilgoe (the librettist of Starlight Express and co-librettist of The Phantom of the Opera) at the American Bar at the Savoy Hotel. As always (I came to learn) Andrew was brimming with energy and ideas. He has always reminded me of Charles Dickens - bursting with new projects and filled with the seemingly endless energy to accomplish them. The first words out of Andrew’s mouth were not “How do you do, I’m Andrew,” or “Welcome to London.” They were, without preamble: “Listen, Ken, I have a great idea for the poster! Covent Garden is about to produce Otello with Placido Domingo, and I think I can arrange a deal where we both use similar posters and help each other with publicity!”

True to his word, Andrew had Lend Me A Tenor open in the West End at the Globe Theatre (now called The Gielgud) within six months of that first call to Washington. Andrew was supportive and kind from the first day on, and couldn’t have been a better, more involved producer. And David Gilmore and I became great friends during the process and we remain dear friends to this day. The production starred Denis Lawson and Jan Francis, went on to garner the Olivier nomination as Comedy of the Year and enjoyed a long, healthy run.

Tenor next jumped from London to Broadway. I was blessed with another remarkable director, Jerry Zaks, and another cast of the Albanian Telephone Directory variety. (Victor Garber and Tovah Feldshuh were at the opening night party on Monday night for the revival, and it was just like old times.) I remember with particular fondness the art deco set for the Broadway production that came out of Tony Walton’s head, along with the amazing costumes by William Ivey Long. In a way, these memories make all the more joyous seeing the sets and costumes for this Broadway revival by John Lee Beatty and Marty Pakledinaz, who have matched the earlier brilliance pound for pound in their own stunning ways.

So here I am after opening night of the revival on Broadway feeling wonderful about the joy that people are having at the Music Box Theatre every night. As Tito would say, “it makes a-me feel proud.” Proud to hear the laughter of the audiences, proud to see them leaving the theatre with smiles on their faces, and proud to have my play reinterpreted for a new generation of theatre-goers.

We start rehearsals for the Lend Me A Tenor revival very soon and I’m ready to get on the train right now and head for New York. I have an open suitcase at the foot of my bed and I keep throwing in things I’ll need during the longish stay in New York for rehearsals. Two nights ago I added a second suitcase, and now I’m up to three. The rehearsals better start realllllly soon …

I’m also thinking about what shows to see in New York during rehearsals. High on my list is the revival of A Little Night Music. I saw Angela Lansbury in Blithe Spirit last year and she was, of course, amazing. On top of which, she’s about the loveliest person I know. I once wrote a piece for her and Lauren Bacall and Glenn Close, which they recited at the Kennedy Center Honors in tribute to Katherine Hepburn. So, knowing Angela a bit, I took my daughter backstage to meet her when we went to the show. Angela was, I promise you, so kind and dear to my daughter that I’ll never forget it. We chatted for at least fifteen minutes, and there was my daughter in the presence of this great spirit and great legend – and you’d have thought they’d been friends for years and years. It was remarkably touching and inspiring. So now I’m looking forward to seeing Angela in Night Music more than ever.

One of my favorite Angela Lansbury performances is as the Princes Gwendolyn in the movie The Court Jester with Danny Kaye. If you haven’t see this movie, run, don’t walk, to the nearest video store and rent it immediately. Every minute of it is remarkable.

On another note, last night ordered the new volume of the Samuel Beckett letters that was just published. I hear it’s fantastic. While I’m waiting for it, I’ve been rereading No Author Better Served, a volume containing the correspondence of Beckett and Alan Schneider, Beckett’s longtime director and friend. (Schneider also directed the world premiere of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and several other great American dramas during his career.) As you probably know, Schneider died in his prime in an accident when he was hit by a motorcycle while crossing the street. What I didn’t know until I read the introduction was that Schneider was walking home after posting a letter to Beckett. In any case, for anyone who loves theatre, I couldn’t possibly recommend the book more highly. It starts with detailed letters about the early productions of Waiting For Godot and just gets better from there. I’ll keep you posted on the Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940 when they arrive.

Lend Me A Tenor is going to be revived on Broadway this spring and of course I’m thrilled about it. This revival has been in the works since the summer, when the producers first got in touch with me. The conversation went something like this: “Hey, Ken. It’s Matthew. The guys and I would like to produce a Broadway revival of Lend Me A Tenor with Stanley Tucci directing. We’re thinking about Tony Shaloub for Saunders. Do you have any interest?”

“Well, let’s see now …”

I’ve been wanting to talk about it here in the blog, but I’ve been waiting dutifully for the official announcement. Well, it’s now official, so please read the press release on the home page of this site. Party hats are welcome.

Stanlely Tucci is indeed the director, and Stan and I have been casting the show for a couple of months now. We’re all crazy about the casting, as well as the creative team, and we can’t wait to go into rehearsal.

Tony Shaloub is onboard (last week he finished his 8th season as Monk and my family and I were glued to the series finale); and the rest of the cast includes Anthony LaPaglia, Jennifer Laura Thompson, Mary Catherine Garrison, Jan Maxwell, Brooke Adams and Jay Klaitz. The creative team includes Ken Posner, John Lee Beatty, Martin Pakledinaz and Peter Hylenski. I’ve worked with Kenny and John Lee in the past, but everybody else is new to me – and I’m very psyched.

One of the biggest thrills about the show for me is that we’ll be in The Music Box Theatre. I’m always excited by the histories of the theatres where my shows are put on, and the history of The Music Box is pretty breathtaking:

It was built in 1921 by Irving Berlin and Sam Harris especially for Berlin’s Music Box Revues. Since then, it has housed the original productions of Dinner at Eight, Stage Door, The Man Who Came To Dinner, Bus Stop, Picnic and The Homecoming, to say nothing of The Male Animal (a favorite of mine since I appeared in it in high school), The Pleasure of his Company (which starred one of my favorite actor/directors of all time, Cyril Ritchard), Sleuth, Deathtrap, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Set To Music and Of Thee I Sing.

So I’ll be tramping around the same stage where Noel Coward, George S. Kaufman, William Inge, Harold Pinter and George and Ira Gershwin tramped before me. Be still my heart.

So please mark your calendars and please come. Performances start March 13th.

Seeing my dear friend Simon Reade just before Thanksgiving, I was reminded of first meeting him a few years ago while he was the Literary Manager and Dramaturg at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Simon and I met when Adrian Noble, then Artistic Director of the RSC, commissioned me to write a play. The result of this commission, as many of you may know, was my play Shakespeare in Hollywood.

Simon talks about the genesis of the play and, indeed, our friendship in his introduction to the Samuel French edition. I thought you might enjoy reading it as you read about Simon's book, Dear Mr. Shakespeare, featured on the homepage.

INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE IN HOLLYWOOD
by Simon Reade

The name rang a bell. “He’s called Ken Ludwig, Simon,” said Adrian Noble, then Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. “He’s in Stratford. Big supporter of the RSC in the States. He’s got some ideas he wants to run past us.” Ken Ludwig? Surely not Lend-Me-ATenor-Crazy-For-You Ken Ludwig? What on earth would that master of American screwball comedy want with a classical, Shakespeare ensemble? As Literary Manager at the RSC at the time I was a champion of poetic theatre, pursuing commissions that tended towards political epics. The imp in me surmised that the RSC could well do with upsetting its own applecart; but it is a state subsidised theatre. This Ken Ludwig is the darling of commercial theatre.
Curious, I met the guy.

Well, never judge a writer entirely by his output. Just as Dostoevsky probably wasn’t all doom and gloom, wisecracking Ken Ludwig’s got his serious points too. Sure, he’s fun, full-of-beans. But he’s also exceptionally well-read, bright as a button, with an enthusiasm for comedy and music theatre across the centuries. He’s an expert who kept – who keeps putting me to shame in my lack of appreciation of the popular stage, of the movies. And I don’t just mean the cheesy matinees we’d snigger and sneer at today. He can extemporise on the clown in European Renaissance drama, on the wit of the 18th century playwrights, on the inter-War stars of the Silver Screen… On our first meeting, in the sunshine of Stratford-upon-Avon, he charmed me, he delighted me. And, canny fellow he is, he’d pitch several ideas at me before I’d even realised
he’s started.

Some had been long in gestation: a rewrite of a Regency Tony Lumpkin sequel to She Stoops to Conquer. We read the original and realised why it necessitated a rewrite. It was trash. We decided not to go there. Some ideas had been dreamt up on the hoof: inspired by walking backstage, along the narrow passage where the huge 1930s Royal Shakespeare Theatre collides with the Elizbethan-style Swan Theatre, Ken had seen the actors from contrasting shows comingle, mid-performance. What if, in this collision, the modern dress performers get confused with the doublet-and-hosed, take a wrong turning and end up on the wrong stage in the wrong play, mused Ken. We laughed and laughed as he improvised and then had the good grace to admit Michael Frayn had written Noises Off, Alan Ayckbourn House and Garden. Ken’s is still an even wilder idea, but we didn’t pursue this either.

We also talked about the whole Shakespeare industry and how the recent movies – from Ken Branagh, via Baz Luhrman, to Shakespeare in Love - had introduced the plays and the man to a whole new generation who’d rejected the works in the classroom or in the lyric theatre. Shakespeare in Love in particular inspired us. Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard’s marvelous screenplay had illustrated how the Elizabethan Theatre of ruthless producers and jobbing script writers, wasn’t a million miles away from the Hollywood studio system.

It was then that Ken mentioned something in passing and we both had that ‘ping’, light-bulb moment. A film I should have known about, but didn’t – Max Reinhardt’s 1936 movie of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – was even more amazing in its making than the finished product itself. It was a story which got right to the heart of the commercialisation of art, the opportunism of Hollywood, the use and abuse of the most venerated writer of all time, Shakespeare. It charted the creative quirks of a meister of mittel Europische Kinema, Max Reinhadt. And it had a cast of starlets: Mickey Rooney, Jimmy Cagney. And the more he talked, the more animated he became. Ken explained to me about Will Hays, the daffy self-appointed censor, whose application of the Hays Code to the sexiness and magical realism of Shakespeare’s dream play was an outrage –very funny, but an outrage nonetheless. And there it was, the embryo of a play which embraced the Shakespeare industry, Hollywood exploitation, US cultural imperialism, the clash of ideologies (liberal and philistine, European and American), of dreams versus nightmares with fascism in Germany a distant but significant rumble. I saw a serious play in the making. I guess Ken had the genius to see that its seriousness could be conveyed through an accumulation of
farcical mayhem.

Key to that, and what I learnt from Ken as we developed it first with the RSC (who didn’t produce it, internal political changes getting in the way) and most recently in a try-out reading at Bristol Old Vic where I am now joint Artistic Director, is this brilliant genre which I believe is peculiar to the American psyche: high-jinx, screwball comedy. British people would never be that zany. We’re too knowingly cynical. Funny, yes. But don’t we just know it. It is a genre specific to the American stage and screen of the mid 20th century. And Ken is the modern master of it, his passion for its vaudevillian high-octane antics fuelling his messianic zeal to recapture its essence for contemporary audiences.

Ken’s passion for Shakespeare (his family, even his personal email address all seem to be named after one Shakespeare character or another) is also evident in his new play. Shakespeare in Hollywood is thus a deeply personal play as much as a popular play. And in the spirit with which I used to commission plays at the RSC it’s also poetic and political and, let’s not be afraid to say it, something of a mini-epic. Yet it’s also got a screw loose, the playwright’s having a ball. Screwball. Good comedy. Good drama. Good fun.
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Simon Reade is joint Artistic Director of Bristol Old Vic where he has adapted Jill Tomlinson’s The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark. He has worked extensively in film and television, for the BBC and Tiger Aspect in particular. He was Literary Manager and Dramaturg at the RSC 1997-2001 where his adaptations included Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Ted Hughes’ Tales from Ovid. He was Literary Manager at London’s Gate Theatre in the early 1990s.

Saw Much Ado About Nothing at the Folger Theatre on Thursday and it was loads of fun. The production has a specific “take”: it’s set at a Caribbean culture festival in modern-day Washington, DC and the cast is a wonderful stew of black, Hispanic, white, Asian, and everything under the sun. This gives the production a terrifically exuberant feel. Everything felt very colorful and fresh. And it was especially revealing to hear how well Shakespeare’s language lends itself so seamlessly to a Caribbean patois.

I bumped into a friend that night who is a famous Shakespeare scholar and he mentioned how, in his view, we always get a new perspective on Shakespeare when it’s translated into other languages. The native speakers of that language get to see Shakespeare in a different, sometimes more original light. Although this production was in English, with the text intact, the Caribbean setting evoked that same kind of feeling. One heard some of the familiar lines afresh.

So Thursday was Shakespeare in lilting English; and Friday was Shakespeare in song. I took the family to see Verdi’s Falstaff at The Washington Opera. The opera is based on The Merry Wives of Windsor, but has a bit of the Falstaff from Henry IV Part 1 thrown in – specifically the “honor” speech, which Verdi makes into an aria in his first scene. Verdi wrote the opera when he was in his late 70s, and it’s simply remarkable to think that anything with so much continuous invention, exuberance and non-stop energy could come out of the pen of someone who swore he was retired a few years before. What a way to go out.

It received an imaginative production from the Washington Opera.
The final set – with the huge oak tree in the middle – was gorgeous, and the Washington Opera Orchestra has never sounded more glorious. The premise of the production was that we were backstage, watching the preparations for a rehearsal of the opera: so that the singer playing the role of Falstaff was writing love letters to two of the other singers, the ones playing Meg and Alice. And that the singer playing Ford was actually married to the singer playing Alice, so he really was jealous of the singer playing Falstaff … you get the idea.

I find it invigorating that Shakespeare continues to be set in so many alternative worlds. Ian McKellan’s Richard III set in Nazi Germany. Branagh’s As You Like It set in feudal Japan. Even when I’m skeptical about the concept, I always hear something new in the text when I see these productions. And on Friday night there was an added bonus: I discovered a whole new instrument! In the pit, next to the trombones, was a “cimbasso.” It’s a kind of trombone-tuba hybrid that I have since learned was used by Verdi in many of his operas. I now want to run out and buy one and take lessons.

Here it is September, and I’m just catching up with August – but I must tell you that at the end of the summer my family and I went to the Edinburgh Festival for the first time, and I’m still agog at how wonderful it was. I’ve been dying to write about it, so here goes:

For anyone who doesn’t know – I didn’t until recently – The Edinburgh Festival is really three festivals that are celebrated at the same time in Edinburgh during the last three weeks of August (and a little bit in September). First, there’s the Edinburgh International Festival, which consists of large-scale, prestigious productions of music, dance and theatre brought in from all over the world. Second, there’s the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which is in smaller venues around the city and consists of lots of stand-up comedy, sketch comedy, rock bands, new playwrights and young performers trying out new material. (Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern started at the Fringe many years ago.) Finally, there’s the Edinburgh International Book Festival, which has wonderful guest speakers and everything else imaginable between hard (and soft) covers.

And because the city is teeming with visitors during August, street performers descend on the city en masse, which makes wandering through Edinburgh (already one of the most gorgeous medieval cities imaginable) a real wonderland of joy all day and all night.

No, this is not a paid announcement sponsored by the Edinburgh Tourist Board. The fact is, it was simply glorious being there and I thought I’d pass it on. (If this act of kindness results in making it even harder to get a hotel room there next year, I’m going to kick myself.)

While we were there, we saw theatre and comedy and opera and dance non-stop for eight days and nights and here are the highlights:

First and foremost, we were lucky enough to get tickets to a recital by Bryn Terfel, one of the greatest living baritones (in my humble opinion). He sang songs from the great Vaughan Williams song-cycle Songs of Travel, as well as songs by Quilter, Schumann and others. It was one of the great musical experiences of my life and I’ll never forget it. Afterwards, my family and I went backstage and met with Bryn. He was wonderfully kind – and lots of fun – and took a real interest in my son’s voice studies. He’s a terrific man and I admire him enormously.

On the Fringe side of things, there were three highlights: a sketch comedy group called Pappy’s Fun Club who were hilarious. They careened from sketch to another – the world’s tallest man, the world’s shortest woman, the funniest dinosaur ever born (his name was Danny) – just four guys and a lot of ingenuity and we all loved them. We also loved a rock group called The Magnets, who create their own back-up band with their own voices. The audience went wild. And we saw my friend Simon Reade’s one-man play called Private Peaceful, based on a children’s book by Michael Morpurgo about a soldier in World War I. It was very moving and beautiful.

The Book Festival? A tent covered all of Charlotte Square and it contained places to sit and commune with fellow book-lovers, so I was in seventh heaven. They also put up a bookstore, which ended up being about the best bookstore I’ve ever browsed. I left the contents of my wallet at the check-out stand; but I brought 19 new books onto the plane home.

I’m also grateful for discovering the poetry of Robert Burns in a big way on the trip. Burns is the national poet of Scotland and they rightly adore him there. I had read the standard poems growing up, but for the first time I realized what a complete genius he was. You should run out of your house immediately and go buy A Night Out With Robert Burns: The Greatest Poems, an anthology edited by Andrew O’Hagan (who adds terrific commentary). Then read “Green Grow the Rashes,” “Mary Morison” and “A Man’s A Man For A’ That.” It will change your life.

I could live in Edinburgh without thinking twice about it. It’s bulging with history, has the best castle I’ve ever seen and lives and breathes books and culture. I’ll never forget my kids climbing all the way up to Arthur’s Seat, which is a huge hill that overlooks the city. Meanwhile, my wife and I had tea at Holyrood Palace and waited for them. Alas for “sit mens sana in corpore sano” (“a healthy mind in a healthy body”). We sipped English Breakfast Tea and sunned ourselves while reading Burns.

I’ve been listening to tons of opera lately. It’s interesting how opera was one of the early loves of my life, then faded a little into the background as I spent about ten years reading every comic play in existence, and has now come back into my life with a bang. Partly this is because my kids are such wonderful musicians, and it’s been a treat introducing them to my favorite operas.

We have a subscription this coming season for The Washington Opera and I can’t wait till it starts. Our first, I think, is “The Barber of Seville.” (Admittedly, we all crack up when we hear the big Figaro aria because we always think of the Bugs Bunny cartoon where he sings it.)

My favorite opera of all time has to be Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, but Verdi’s Falstaff runs it a mighty close second. Tonight we were watching our favorite DVD of The Marriage of Figaro. It has Gerald Finley as Figaro and Alison Hagley as Susanna (she’s sublime) and it’s a genuine work of art. The opening scene where Figaro is measuring the room for the marriage bed is both hilarious and touching at the same time. Renee Fleming plays the Countess, Andreas Schmidt is the Count and Bernard Haitink conducts. I just couldn’t recommend it more highly. (A company called Kultur sells it and I assume it’s still in print.)

I was a music composition and theory major in college as a result of my love for opera. And from there everything just deepened. The biggest thrill of my musical life was studying with Leonard Bernstein. Be still my heart. I wish I could go back and do it again.

Lend Me A Tenor, of course, is about the world of opera; and I wrote it partly to honor that world that I loved so much. I remember that during the run of Tenor on Broadway I used it as the basis for a question on The Texaco Opera Quiz – and they put it on the air and I was thrilled to bits. (And I got some free CDs out of it.)

I don’t know why I fell in love with opera so early. It was just love at first listen. I often wonder about my passion for all things Shakespeare in the same way. I don’t know why I started loving it at such a young age – I heard the first few words and my eyes started spinning around in my head.

Pretty much the earliest Shakespeare I ever heard was a recording of Richard Burton’s Hamlet. For whatever reason, I bought the LPs and I listened to them so much that I literally wore out the plastic. (I recently acquired a new set of the LPs for old time’s sake through eBay – though the performance is now available on DVD.) One of my fondest recollections of my father is when I was tiny and he shlepped me to a movie theatre to see a re-release of the movie of Julius Caesar with James Mason, John Gielgud and Marlon Brando. He had no more interest than the man in the moon, but he took me anyway. What a dad. (Only rivaled by my mom taking me backstage in New York to meet the great actor/director Cyril Ritchard (pictured right) – where opera and plays met in a single, wonderful man. What a mom.)

So now I’m heading back to Act Two of Marriage of Figaro. It may keep us up all night, but what a way to spend the summer.

I plan to use this space to keep in touch with you, post information on recent and upcoming projects—including your productions of my plays—and share recommendations and general musings. I love hearing from you, so if you have questions you'd like me to answer, or things you'd like me to discuss in this blog, please send them along through the "Ask Ken a Question" link on the homepage or in the box on the right.

Latest news: I just finished a new comedy, entitled A Fox On The Fairway. It’s about golf and sex. I love golf. I’m terrible at it and only get to play about five times a year. I have no comment about sex.

The play opens as underdog Quail Valley Country Club prepares to take on arch-rival Crouching Squirrel in this year’s Annual Inter-Club Golf Tournament. With a sizable wager at stake, the contest plays out amidst three love affairs, a disappearing diamond, objectionable sweaters and an exploding Ming vase.

Fox, as I now call it, is a six-character comedy in the style of Lend Me A Tenor. I wrote it as a tribute to the great English farces of the 1930s and 40s like See How They Run and When We Are Married that I love so much. I felt moved to write it as an antidote to the times we live in, to try and move the ball a trifle closer to the sanity and good fellowship we all deserve.

The first reading of the play was last week at Signature Theatre (right) in Arlington, Virginia. (They won the 2009 Regional Theatre Tony Award.) Eric Schaeffer, the Artistic Director of Signature, graciously gave me 29 hours of rehearsal and performance time in their main stage space, and the performance was last Thursday night to a packed house.

John Rando (who helmed the world premiere of my play Be My Baby at the Alley Theatre a couple of years ago) came down from New York to direct, and Signature’s associate director, Michael Baron, helped me assemble a cast of wonderful actors, including Holly Twyford (left), Chris Bloch, Valerie Leonard, Margo Seibert, Cody Nickell & Sam Ludwig. Kerry Epstien was our intrepid stage manager, Patrick Jaffke was her assistant, Will Lurie read the stage directions and Matt Rowe did the sound. Many thanks to everyone involved. The staff at the Signature is beyond compare.

It was a riotously fun evening and turned out to be a terrific way to launch the play. Everyone seemed to love it (knock wood) and I’m about to put a few finishing touches on it and launch it out into the world.

Back to work now. Please let me know what you think of my having a blog like this. Send me questions and I’ll write more soon. Many thanks.