JTMF Alumni News

Alumni News #3 - September, 2007

Coming Attractions:

Kathy Garofano (Sound Technician, Psycho Beach Party) and Brady Neiderer (The Altruists) will be appearing in Shakespeare 70's production of The Glass Menagerie, September 20, 21, 22, 27, 28 & 29 at 8:00 PM and September 23 at 2:00 PM at the Don Evans Studio Theatre in Kendall Hall on the campus of The College of New Jersey, Ewing. Kathy will be playing Amanda and Brady will appear as her son, Tom. For tickets and info, please visit: http://www.shakespeare70.org/

Adam Fitting (Psycho Beach Party) can currently be seen literally makin' bacon in a series of new TV commercials for Hatfield Quality Meats. Adam plays a doting dad making breakfast for his loving family. Aww! (You can't miss those giant hands placing strips of bacon on the plate.)

The James Tolin Memorial Fund is proud to announce their Sixth Annual AIDS Benefit, featuring Joe Orton's madhouse sex farce, What the Butler Saw, on June 20, 21 and 22, 2008. The production includes our first ever Sunday matinee. After a trip to Psycho Beach, the only logical place to go? Why, the madhouse, of course. But this is no ordinary madhouse. Here, the doctors are crazier than the patients and no one is truly who they appear to be. Sex; drugs; cross-dressing and other assorted mayhem are all on the bill in Orton's 1970 comedy of errors. Ticket sales are already breaking records for a JTMF show, so don't hesitate; order your tickets now by clicking on the link to the Kelsey Theatre, conveniently located to the right of this entry.
Watch this space or visit http://www.jtmf.org/ for more details.

Special Announcements:

The James Tolin Memorial Fund Board will hold the first of their monthly meetings to plan the 2008 Event on Monday, September 10th, in Bordentown. Topics will include possible themes for the 2008 reception and suggestions for the 2009 production. If you have a play you would like to suggest for our 2009 Event, please leave it as a comment below, or email us at JTMFBlogQuery@aol.com.

In Case You Missed It:

Josiah DeAndrea (The Altuists; Psycho Beach Party) saw two major milestones last month with the premier production of his play Angels as We Fall at the Kelsey Studio Theatre, and his New York debut in the NYC Fringe Festival Production of Alex Defazio's To Be Loved, which was directed by Jody Person (Mr. Charles...). Angels as We Fall also featured Damian Geata (The Altruists; Psycho Beach Party) while To Be Loved featured JTMF Scholarship winner, Eric A. Rojas. Congrats to all!


Have something you want posted in the JTMF Alumni News? Please email us at JTMFBlogQuery@aol.com. Submission deadline is the 26th for inclusion in the following month's issue. Submissions received after the 26th will posted under In Case You Missed It, one month later. All submissions are reviewed and and may be edited before posting. Submissions deemed "inappropriate" by the Blog Administrator will not be posted.

Hot Cakes!

Ticket sales continue to be brisk for the 6th Annual JTMF AIDS Benefit production of Joe Orton's madhouse sex farce, What the Butler Saw. As of this writing, over 175 tickets have been sold for next summer's production. That's record-breaking for the JTMF, and we couldn't be happier.

You don't want to miss out on this hilarious comedy of errors by the late author of Loot and Entertaining Mr. Sloan. To order your advance tickets to this hilarious show, visit the Kelsey Theatre website, conveniently linked to the right.

Watch this space for further details!

Advance Ticket Sales Boom!

Ticket sales for the JTMF 6th Annual AIDS Benefit featuring Joe Orton's madhouse sex farce, What the Butler Saw, are already breaking records.

Thanks to our inclusion in the Kelsey Theatre 2007/2008 Season Brochure, 114 tickets have already been sold for a show that is almost a year away! Incredible!

We shouldn't have to tell to get your tickets early, but we will. To order tickets on line, use the link to the Kelsey website conveniently located to the right of this entry. Hurry - you aren't going to want to miss it!

JTMF ALUMNI NEWS

JTMF Alumni News #2 - August, 2007

Coming Attractions:

Eve Connolly (The Odd Couple) has been cast in the role of Eleanor in The Lion in Winter with the Bordentown Community Players. The show goes up in mid-October. More information to follow.

Five members of the JTMF family, along with a recipient of the James Tolin Memorial Scholarship, will be participating in the premiere of a new play, To Be Loved by Alex Defazio, at the NYC Fringe Festival this month. Jody Person (Mr. Charles...) directs; Josiah DeAndrea (The Altruists; Psycho Beach Party) is a featured performer; technicians Robert Terrano, Carol Zingone and Chris Ghaffoor are the project's Technical Director, Assistant Stage Manager and Lighting Designer, respectively and JTMF scholarship winner Eric A. Rojas also performs. The Fringe Festival is very competitive. If our alumni are going to be a hit, they need audiences! So please come out and support them by purchasing tickets in advance of the show's first performance and showing them your proud faces in the house. Tickets for To Be Loved are only $15.00 and can be purchased now, by phone at 212-279-4488 or online at: http://www.fringenyc.org/seeing/tickets.asp.
To Be Loved performs at The Lafayette Street Theatre (45 Bleeker Street at Lafayette) on Sunday, August 12 at 2:45pm; Wednesday, August 15 at 3:45pm; Saturday, August 18 at 2:30pm; Thursday, August 23 at 9:15pm; and Friday, August 24 at 9:00pm. For more information, visit http://www.elixirproductions.org/.
Jody asks: "If you can manage, please remember to purchase your tickets as soon as possible; the more advance ticket sales we get, the more positive attention it will draw to the show!"

Brian Bara (Publicity Coordinator) will hold a public reading of his original screenplay, Comatose Joe, on Monday, August 13th at 7:30 PM in the Don Evans Studio Theatre in Kendall Hall on the campus of The College of New Jersey in Ewing. Comatose Joe is a comedy about Joe Lanahan, a young playwright who awakens from a two-year coma to find that his last play has become a huge hit, despite its shortcomings. Determined to write a better, serious play, Joe finds himself out of ideas. But when he is car-jacked by a beautiful magician's assistant on the lam, he lands right in the middle of what may well be the solution he's been looking for. For more information, please send an email to: LaLunaAzur@aol.com

The James Tolin Memorial Fund is proud to announce their Sixth Annual AIDS Benefit, featuring Joe Orton's madhouse sex farce, What the Butler Saw, on June 20, 21 and 22, 2008. The production includes our first ever Sunday matinee. After a trip to Psycho Beach, the only logical place to go? Why, the madhouse, of course. But this is no ordinary madhouse. Here, the doctors are crazier than the patients and no one is truly who they appear to be. Sex; drugs; cross-dressing and other assorted mayhem are all on the bill in Orton's 1970 comedy of errors. Watch this space or visit http://www.jtmf.org/ for more details to come.

Special Announcements:

Josiah DeAndrea (The Altruists; Psycho Beach Party) has been accepted into Pace University's BFA Acting Program and has been awarded $17,000 in scholarships.

Aubrey Malloy (Psycho Beach Party) has been accepted into Pace University's BA Theatre Arts program.

Nicole Patrick (Psycho Beach Party) has moved to Park Slope in Brooklyn. She says: "Those of you who are going to be the Manhattan/Brooklyn area, let me know and I'd love to see you and have you visit!!!!"

In Case You Missed It:

July was a quiet month for the JTMF family. We hope everyone is enjoying their summer!

Have something you want posted in the JTMF Alumni News? Please email us at JTMFBlogQuery@aol.com. Submission deadline is the 26th for inclusion in the following month's issue. Submissions received after the 26th will posted under In Case You Missed It, one month later. All submissions are reviewed and and may be edited before posting. Submissions deemed "inappropriate" by the Blog Administrator will not be posted.

New Monthly Feature: JTMF Alumni News

Welcome to the first monthly edition of the James Tolin Memorial Fund's Alumni News, for and about the members of the extended JTMF Family and their families, friends and admirers.

Each month we'll be bringing you updates on who's doing what, when, where and with whom (come on, you know we had to make sound a little dirty).

The column will be divided into three sections:

Coming Attractions, for folks with projects about to be produced.

Special Announcements, for letting us know about marriages; births; anniversaries; bar/bat-mitzvahs; First Communions; Sweet Sixteens; loss of virginity; new job; new home; new pet; new furniture and/or any of the other momentous occasions in your life which you feel compelled to share with the entire world via the World Wide Web.

In Case You Missed It, for folks who just didn't get their announcements in by the deadline, but still want to let us know what they have been up to (Okay - it's for the procrastinators - are you happy now?).

So without further ado:

JTMF ALUMNI NEWS #1 - July, 2007

Coming Attractions

Watch for our own Mark Violi (The Odd Couple; Psycho Beach Party) to appear in both print (on billboards, no less) and television ads for the Philadelphia Inquirer's "Get it While it's Hot" Summer campaign.

Josiah DeAndrea (The Altruists; Psycho Beach Party) sees the premiere production of his original play Angels as We Fall, August 17th & 18th at 8PM in the Kelsey Studio Theatre on the MCCC campus. Angels as We Fall re-imagines the tale of Lucifer's fall from grace as a modern allegory of love, family and the struggle between light and dark.

The James Tolin Memorial Fund proudly presents the Sixth Annual JTMF AIDS Benefit, featuring Joe Orton's madhouse sex farce, What the Butler Saw, June 20, 21 and 22nd, 2008. After a trip to Psycho Beach, where else could we go but the madhouse? And trusts us, the doctors in this asylum are far crazier than any of the patients. Watch this space or visit http://www.jtmf.org/ for details.

Special Announcements

Katie Pierce (The Alruists) has gotten engaged! Hubby-to-be Nick DeVito, proposed at a private table on the beach, during a perfect Aruban sunset on June 18th. No date has been set for the wedding. Congratulations and best of luck, Katie and Nick!

In Case You Missed It

The only thing you might have missed was our fabulous Fifth Anniversary Gala, featuring Charles Busch's Psycho Beach Party. The Gala was our second most successful event to date, raising nearly $10,000 for the Open Arms Foundation; Grafitti Productions and the James Tolin Memorial Scholarship at MCCC. The riotous production was the wildest show of the season, featuring an astoundingly talented cast of veterans and new-comers to the JTMF, all of whom rallied to the call and had more fun than should be legal, while raising money for charity. And let's not forget the amazing Red Carpet Event featuring Gary Dee as Joan Rivers; Kevin Jackson as Diana Ross and Phil Marino as Peggy Lee, courtesy of HOLLYWOOD Entertainment (http://www.hollywooddjz.com/). The luau reception was almost as hot as the gorgeous bathing beauties and surf hunks on stage and our Silent Auction was a smashing success! Our deepest, most heartfelt thanks go out to all of the wonderful folks who gave of their time and talents to make the event the success that it was.

Have news you'd like us to share? Email it to us at JTMFBloqQuery@aol.com
Submission deadline for inclusion in the following month's edition is the 26th. Submissions received after the 26th will be posted under In Case You Missed It, one month later.
Please keep it clean and real. Please make sure that all pertinant info (dates, times, contact info, web addresses, etc.) is included with your submission - we don't have time to track you down for missing details. All submissions will be reviewed and may be edited before posting. Submissions deemed inappropriate by the Blog Administrator will not be included.

The Numbers are In!

Thanks to everyone who attended and/or supported the James Tolin Memorial Fund's Fifth Anniversary AIDS Benefit Gala. We enjoyed our second most successful event ever, and raised nearly $10,000 (almost $6,000 in ticket sales and almost $4,000 in Silent Auction Sales and cash donations)!

Make sure you watch this space for additional photos and updates on next year's production of Joe Orton's madhouse sex farce, What the Butler Saw, June 20th, 21st and 22nd, 2008, featuring our first-ever Sunday Matinee! To add to the fun, tickets to our Sunday matinee will be available as part of your Kelsey Theatre Season Subscription! See the Kelsey Theatre brochure or visit their website (linked to the right) for details!

We'll also be sponsoring special "Pride Night" events at several shows on the '07/'08 Kelsey schedule (and maybe a special evening of our own, too). So stop by now and again. You never know what you might find here.

Our Cast & The JTMF Board

The Cast of Charles Busch's Psycho Beach Party:
(click photos to enlarge) Doug Edelson as Mrs. Forest; Tina Henderson as Berdine; Mark Violi as Star Cat; Adam Fitting as Kanaka; Nicole Patrick as Chicklet; Director Brian Bara; Damian Gaeta as Provoloney; Josiah DeAndrea as YoYo; Aubry Malloy as Marvel Anne; Melanie Britten as Bettina Barnes and Josh Minton as Nicky.

The JTMF Board:
Production Coordinator Bruce Frangione; Event Coordinator Tracy Antozzeski; Silent Auction Coordinator Melissa Abrahams; Honorary Member Doug Edelson; Publicity Coordinator Brian Bara; Honorary Member David Maurio (seated). Not Pictured: Honorary Member Joyce Labriola.