May 12, 2012
Best Musical: Second Chance to Win RileysDiner Sketch
Posted by Michael in : Contest , add a comment
Here’s your second chance to win a free sketch from RileysDiner. For details for the entire contest, check out our earlier post.
For your second entry, send an email to rileyscontest@gmail.com to tell us the winner in the Best Musical category. Please include your name, address and the name of the play you’re voting for. For the record, your information is confidential. We don’t provide it to anyone else.
If you’re correct, you’ll be entered into our random drawing to win a free script. You can still vote in the Best Play category, too. The drawing will be held immediately after the broadcast of the Tony Awards on June 10. The winner will be posted on the blog.
You can vote only once in each category. Voting for more than one entry in the same category will disqualify you. Break a leg!
May 7, 2012
Best Play: First Chance to Win RileysDiner Sketch
Posted by Michael in : Contest , add a comment
Here’s the first of four chances to win a free sketch from RileysDiner. Check out our earlier post for the details on the entire contest.
For your first entry, send an email to rileyscontest@gmail.com to tell us the winner in the Best Play category. Please include your name, address and the name of the play you’re voting for.
If you’re correct, you’ll be entered into our random drawing to win a free script. The drawing will be held immediately after the broadcast of the Tony Awards. The winner will be posted on the blog.
You can vote only once in each category. Voting for more than one entry in the same category will disqualify you. All the best!
April 29, 2012
Four Chances to Win RileysDiner Script in Our Tony Awards Contest
Posted by Michael in : Uncategorized , 2comments
Watch for our Tony Awards contest next month on our Facebook page for up to four chances to win a free script from RileysDiner.com. Here’s how it works.
The Tony nominees will be announced May 1. Each Saturday in May, we’ll post one of the categories here on the RileysDiner blog, and you email us to vote for who you think will win. The categories will be Best Play, Best Musical, Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play, and Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play.
For each winner you correctly name, you’ll be entered into our drawing to win one of our nonroyalty sketches. (Reading copies of our one-act Christmas scripts are not eligible.) Correctly vote for all four winners, and you’ll have four chances to win.
You’ll have until noon (CST) June 9 to vote. You can only vote once in each category. We’ll draw the winning entry after the Tonys are broadcast on June 10. The winner will be announced on our blog and will have 30 days to select their script. If they don’t choose a script, we’ll draw another name and give that person 30 days to choose their script. And so on.
October 29, 2011
“Judgement House,” Other Scary Church Plays Thrive on Manipulating People
Posted by Michael in : Acting , add a comment
Years ago, I went to a performance of "Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames" at a church near my home in the St. Louis metro region. The play was a series of vignettes depicting different people dying and facing their eternal judgments.
Some went to Heaven; others were dragged away screaming to Hell. As a drama, it was predictable. With each scene, you were introduced to new characters, at least one of whom was going to die in the next few minutes.
While much of my recollection of that production is fuzzy, two scenes left strong impressions. One featured a young woman who commits suicide and then is sent to Hell; the other told the tale of a father and teen son killed in a car accident followed by a demon tormenting the father as he watches his son dragged off to Hell first.
February 11, 2011
How To Know When You’ve Got the Right Ending for Your Script
Posted by Michael in : Writing , 2comments
Endings are hard.
I’ve been working on a long overdue new sketch for the website. When I read what I’ve written so far, I’m really happy with it until I get to the end. It just sort of stops. Something about the ending doesn’t work for me. I know that it’s not ready. It doesn’t tell the audience that the story is done. It’s made me think about how important the right ending is to a story. And – spoiler warning – I’ve been thinking about some of my favorite endings.
January 20, 2011
Three Sweet Church Drama Scripts for Valentine’s Day
Posted by Michael in : Writing , add a comment
Valentine’s Day is less than a month away. That’s still enough time to 
put together a drama for the Sunday before the holiday. We have three scripts – “He Shoots, She Scores,” “The Wedded-Bliss Title Agency” and “Escape to Nowhere” – that you could order from the RileysDiner menu. Place your order today, and you’ll have a PDF of the script emailed to you within 24 hours.
December 16, 2010
Want To Be A Good Actor? Start Acting Like a Child
Posted by Michael in : Acting , add a comment
OK. This is way too cute. Make yourself a hot cup of coffee and spend the next seven-and-a-half minutes watching this little girl tell the story of Jonah.
This would be a great video to show your church drama group. Start a discussion about what this girl does that makes her delivery so effective. What makes her such a good storyteller?
There’s a lot that I take away from this. What does it say to you? One thing that stands out for me is how children have a fantastic ability to pretend. As we get older and more serious, we lose that gift – or maybe we’re too afraid to show it. When you get right down to it, isn’t that what acting is all about? Pretending?
We work so hard to deliver memorized lines, but what if we just push ourselves to the next level, stop worrying about delivering a string of memorized words and phrases, and just let go and pretend when we do our next sketch?
December 11, 2010
More Than 1,300 Experience Pflugerville Church’s Dramatic Journey on ‘The Road to Bethlehem’
Posted by Michael in : Acting , add a comment
More than 1,300 people turned our for two performances of Pflugerville Community Church’s production of “Journey to Bethlehem” on Dec. 3-4. This is the sixth year that the church, which 
is about 20 miles north of Austin, Texas, has performed my one-act interactive Christmas drama – and I’m honored that they have continued to make this a holiday tradition in their community.
They had 522 people the first night, followed by a whopping 822 people the second night. Wow!! And Heidi Gollub, who directed the production at the church, told me that 60 percent of the people who attended were first-time visitors. If your church is looking for a great way to establish a Christmas tradition for your community that focuses on why we celebrate the season, consider checking out this holiday drama from RileysDiner.com.
Here’s what one of the visitors wrote about their experience on the first night:
August 18, 2010
“Hesperia” Gets Dialogue Right for Church People
Posted by Michael in : Uncategorized , add a comment
I traveled to Chicago last Saturday to see the closing night of “Hesperia,” a play by Randall Colburn and staged by the Right Brain Project. It’s part of a commitment that I’m making to seeing plays, not just reading them. Both are important if you want to write for the stage.
In the play, Claudia is engaged to the youth minister of the local church in Hesperia, a town somewhere in the Midwest, or so I gathered, that’s near to the town where she grew up. Years earlier, she and a childhood friend, Ian, had traveled to Los Angeles after high school to start their life together and were soon drawn into the porn industry and drug addiction. Feeling that her life was empty, Claudia returned to the region where she grew up, looking for meaning and settling in Hesperia, a community where no one really knows her.
April 16, 2010
When “Doctor Who” Resembled Church Drama
Posted by Michael in : Writing , add a comment
The new season of Doctor Who premieres on BBC America tonight with Matt Smith stepping in to the lead role as the 11th incarnation of the Time Lord who travels the universe in search of adventure. I’ve been a fan of the show since I discovered the classic series on our local PBS station when I was in high school or college. That was when Tom Baker played the eccentric 900-year-old Time Lord. He’s still one of my favorite actors to portray the Doctor.
For those who are unfamiliar with the series, the Doctor is a renegade Time Lord from the planet of Gallifrey. Not content to merely observe events, he explores the universe in a ship that travels through space and time called a TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimensions In Space). His particular TARDIS is stuck in the shape of an old British police box, thanks to a faulty chameleon circuit. The TARDIS is larger on the inside than it is on the outside.
The series premiered in Britain in the 1960s with William Hartnell as the first incarnation of the Doctor. When Hartnell left the series, producers wrote him out by having the Doctor regenerate. They introduced the idea that whenever Time Lords are seriously injured or near death, their bodies heal themselves by regenerating into a new physical form. Therefore, a completely different actor can play the Doctor and add his own mark to the role. The series was canceled in 1989 but resurrected five years ago by Russell T Davies. There was an interesting story about the writing of Doctor Who in the years before its cancellation that made me think that it was a lot like church drama.