Last Chance This Weekend—

One-Man Show Receiving Its Local Premiere

DANBURY — It is one thing to write a play, something much more to both write and star in it. Add the assistance of a famed Tony Award-winning actor and director, and one Danbury resident has the makings of a show bound for off-Broadway and then a national tour beginning in 2006.

Hat City Music Theater is presenting David Katz in his acclaimed one-man play, Muse of Fire, with just one performance remaining in the local debut run.

Muse of Fire is the story of a great conducting teacher and his apprentice, a living memoir based on Mr Katz’s own experiences studying with Charles Bruck, the man many consider the 20th Century’s greatest teacher of conducting. Muse of Fire will be  performed on Sunday, November 20, at 5 pm, at United Jewish Center auditorium, 141 Deer Hill Avenue.

 Tickets are $10 in advance and $15 at the door and are available by calling toll free 877-746-2694 or online at BrownPaperTickets.com.

Hailed as “spellbinding,” “deeply moving” and “brilliant” in its world premiere in Maine this past summer, Muse of Fire is a riveting, funny and ultimately moving account of the years Mr Katz spent learning the art of conducting from Maestro Bruck. Demonic in his fury, Mr Bruck’s rages were legendary, but so was his acid wit and his uncompromising belief in great music.

“At first, I hated him,” says the playwright/conductor and actor, who is also artistic director of Danbury’s professional Hat City Music Theater. “He was insulting and degrading, but he changed me. Because of him, I am a conductor. Those of us who survived his exactly standards came to love him.”

While conceiving the full length drama, in which the actor plays both his younger self and Bruck, along with a menagerie of fellow conducting students, Katz turned to his good friend, Charles Nelson Reilly, to ask him to direct. Best known as the zany television personality on such television shows as “The Match Game,” Mr Reilly is in fact a Tony Award-winning actor and acclaimed Broadway director, and perhaps the world’s most successful director of one-person plays.

Mr Reilly’s Broadway directing credits include The Belle of Amherst, with Julie Harris, and one-person plays for such actors as James Earl Jones, Stan Freeman and Ruby Dee. Mr Reilly was the only American director nominated for a Tony Award in 1997 for his staging of “The Gin Game” starring Miss Harris and Charles Durning.