I love our cast and crew so much.  I love working with them every second of every rehearsal.  I love them so much that I could easily say that merely getting to perform the show with them would be good enough.

Cyriaque and Dave stand in front of Zipperface's future home, the Dixon Place Theater

Of course, I could just as easily say that I spend my nights swooping around New Brunswick, fighting crime as a masked vigilante with super fireball powers.  Saying either of these things would be incredibly simple, unfortunately, that doesn’t make either of them remotely true.

You see, I must confess, that we’re actually doing this show with the hope that people come to see it.  No, performing to no one merely for the sake of performing just isn’t rewarding enough.  Trust me, I put on a much cheaper version of Zipperface every morning while taking a shower but it’s just not as good.  There’s no audience!  Plus, Lauren’s portrayal of female lead Lisa Rider is much more in tune to the character than mine.
So, in an attempt to make sure there are actually people sitting in the Dixon Place’s very comfortable seats come August, we headed yesterday to Fringe’s official Marketing Mixer!

At this point, you’re probably wondering what on earth a Marketing Mixer is.  Well, it’s an event where spokespeople from all of the shows in the festival gather at a bar in New York to meet and discuss marketing ideas.  Basically you look for plays which might have similar audiences and you make deals to help promote each other’s show.  And, basically, I sucked at it.
As we looked around trying to come up with shows to talk to, I felt like we were at a middle school dance trying to come up with ways to start dancing with the pretty girls.  God help us when we came to a show that had actual pretty girls as spokespeople.
Anyway, in the end we had a great time, talked to some cool people, and heard about some really fascinating shows.  Hell, eventually you may hear about those shows in a Links page on our site because that’s just the kind of great marketing ideas people come up with at a Marketing Mixer.

The sign on the front door.

After we left, Dave, Cyriaque (Zipperface’s ACR, which is a person who acts as the go between for the crew and Fringe), and I went downtown to check out our theater.  The festival specifically prohibits participants just showing up at their venues but we circumnavigated the rule by going to see a show there.  Coincidentally, it turned out the show was another musical that heavily featured the accordion.  Maybe we’ve unknowingly hit upon some kind of new trend.
Well, the show was fun and, more importantly for us, the theater is even better than we could have possibly imagined!  We were worried when we read how big the stage was that it wasn’t going to be the kind of intimate environment that we were hoping for but we couldn’t have been more wrong.  When you come to see Zipperface in a few months, your going to feel like our cast of hobos can reach right out and touch you!
Wait, scratch that.  That sentence isn’t going to sell any tickets.  Here, try this:

When you come to see Zipperface in a few months, your going to feel like the group of attractive young actresses we have wearing sexy hooker costumes in our show can reach right out and touch you!

That’s much better.
Anywho, all in all it was a great day in the city and a great way to get us pumped for the incredibly tough rehearsal schedule we’ve got coming up this week!

Everybody, just like we’ve been promised, we’re adding some music, a batch of pictures, or backstage video every week.  This week we added a new song from the show.  It’s a recording of the song “Let’s Put On a Terrible Play” from the original 2008 Rutgers production and it’s absolutely awesome!  Don’t listen to me though, listen to it!
You can listen to it at our media page.  Enjoy!

Hello everybody and welcome to the official blog of Zipperface!!?!: The Hobo Musical and its production at the 2009 New York International Fringe Festival: a festival with a name so needlessly long that it can only be rivaled by a play with the title “Zipperface!!?!: The Hobo Musical”!

My name is Jon Bershad and I am a co-writer, co-producer, assistant director, and occasional actor of the piece.  Therefore, if there’s anything that someone would like to know about the show and I don’t know it, chances are that I’m failing at least one of my jobs.  Fortunately, I don’t think that that’s going to happen and, furthermore, I know that we’re going to do our best to impart all of our wonderful Zipperface knowledge to you through this blog.  Over the next two months, leading up to opening night in mid-August, myself and all of my fellow members of the Zipperface staff will be coming on here to give you all of the backstage gossip, production trivia, and show history so that you know everything there is to know about our little musical.  Hell, we’re even gonna have some of the actors come on here to post what I can only assume will be blog entries about what it’s like to be blessed with wonderful genes that make you grow up real pretty.

We all really believe in this show and we’re going to do all we can to make you as excited about it as we are.  To help do that, we plan on using this blog to make you feel like you’re a part of the production.  That way, when you finally come see the show, you can lean over to the person next to you and say, “Hey, do you see that chair up there?  They totally bought it at this wacky chair store in South Jersey.”  And then the person next to you will say, “Shhh!  I’m trying to watch this.”  And then you’ll be all, “I’m sorry.”  But then they’ll think about it for a second and say, “How do you even know that?” which will lead you to say, “I totally read their blog all summer.” And, of course, then they’ll say, “Wow, you’re a total loser.”  Fortunately, however, I will hear you from up on stage and I’ll back you up and say, “He’s not a loser!  Our blog is incredibly awesome and has, all summer, been the perfect place to see cool pictures, listen to music clips, and learn everything there is to know about this show.”  And then you’ll say, “Whoa, what an amazing coincidence that that line of dialogue perfectly fit into the conversation that we were having.”  And then I’ll say, “No, it isn’t a coincidence.  That wasn’t a line of dialogue.  You just happen to be talking very loudly in the middle of our theatrical performance and we all heard you.  I take it back, you are a loser.”  But don’t worry.  I won’t mean it.

Anyway, I, for one, plan on taking a bunch of pictures throughout the rehearsals and posting them up here so you can see our absolutely wonderful cast and crew in their natural habitat.  Through the magic of technology, I’ll be able to post the coolest ones in minutes.  Here, I’ll take one right now and post it.

See?  I just took this with my phone!  Sure, it has absolutely nothing to do with Zipperface, but tell me this magazine cover isn’t absolutely hilarious.  Seriously, look at it closely.

Anyway, I guess that’s it for me for now.  Keep checking back here for all the updates throughout the summer, from important ones like the official show dates when Fringe announces them in about a week, to the less important ones like the one about that hilarious thing that happened that one time at that rehearsal to that one guy in our cast.  That post is gonna be a doozy!  And also keep checking the rest of the site as we plan on updating it every week with new stuff on the media page.  And, if you really want the full picture, please join our Facebook Fan Page!

I’m off but, before I go, here’s one last thing to whet your appetite for all the cool stuff we have coming (in case my wonderful prose hasn’t already done the trick).  Nothing too exciting, just a picture Dave took of Andy and I as the three of us wrote the original script all the way back in late 2007.  Let this picture tell you many things, like that I used to have a stupid afro, Dave had cool chairs in his room, and that we will soon be posting an entry telling you all about the history of Zipperface!!?!: The Hobo Musical! How exciting is that?

Oh, not really?  Well, I tried.