|
In addition to penning Marrying Terry, Gregg Opelka has written music and lyrics for eight musicals produced in the United States and around the world. Of these, Hotel d'Amour, Monky Business, Soup du Jour, C'est la Vie and Monky Business II are published and licensed by Dramatic Publishing. His French chanson musical C'est la Vie (original title: La Vie Ennui) was produced at the Oxford Fringe Festival in April 2009. It also ran, in Hungarian, at Hungary's largest theater, The Madach Szinhas in Budapest, in 2004-05 and will be remounted at the Budapest Chamber Theater in 2010. In 2005 it played at Vienna's English Theater. An ongoing touring production of C'est la Vie is playing in cities across Spain through 2010, and the musical is returning to its premiere city of Chicago in October-November 2009 in a Light Opera Works production. Opelka has also written new English lyrics for seven foreign operettas first produced at Light Opera Works in Evanston, Ill., including The Merry Widow (Lehar) and The Duchess of Chicago (Kalman). His musical The Three Musketeers was read at the National Alliance of Music Theater festival of readings in New York in 1993 and produced that same year at the Academic Theater of Musical Comedy in Ekaterinburg, Russia, where it ran for four years. After its Chicago premiere, his first musical, Charlie's Oasis, was produced in Omsk, Russia, in 1990, where it was the first-ever joint Soviet-American production of an American musical. In 2002 Chicago Reader named him one of "2002's People of the Year in Chicago Theater" after productions of Soup du Jour and La Vie Ennui both had their Chicago premieres that year, the latter a world premiere. Opelka made his television debut in September 2008 on CNN's Showbiz Tonight with his original election song-video "My Momma's for Obama but My Daddy's for McCain" which aired regularly from September through November on the cable TV show. His latest play Arms and the Woman, a mystery romance, is in development.
|
