Hereafter Musical Is Alive And Well And Returns To Buenos Aires On February 17th

It's pretty amazing that, in the hard to survive, fickle world of musical theatre, a show about how we all deal with death should have so many lives. Frankie Keane and I first met in 2008 and finished the first draft of "Hereafter Musical" in August 2010 when it had its premiere in a workshop at the Roy Arias Theater (43rd & 8th Ave). We learned a lot from that workshop...mainly that the show was too long and needed new songs. We dug deep and fixed a lot of the problem and had our official off-Broadway premier in April of 2012 at Theater 80 in the East Village. We got great reviews, sold out most of our shows and yet we closed in two weeks, mainly because the show was self funded and self (i.e. ME) ran out of money. But we knew we had a very special show and brought it back again in September of 2014 at the Snapple Theatre (Broadway and 50th) where we were actually on Broadway (at least geographically!) We ran for 14 weeks and again...great reviews, sold out shows and you guessed it..I ran out of money. As you've gathered by now, musical theater is not for the faint of heart. It's expensive and it's time consuming BUT when you get it right and capture lightening in a bottle the way Frankie and I did, it's all worth it.

You can imagine how excited we were when we heard that a a tight knit group of theater fanatics from Buenos Aires had fallen in love with our show via our Youtube Channel. This amazing group of talented and dedicated people took great care with our baby, taught it how to speak and sing in Spanish and christened it "Quien Retiene A Quien" (which was inspired by a line from our show and loosely translates to "Who Is Holding Who Back.") "Quien Retiene A Quien" premiered in September 2017 at Metropolitan Sura in the heart of Buenos Aires Theatre district where it played eight sold out weeks. Words can not describe how special Debbie, Jonathan, Frankie and I felt sitting (anonymously) in that sold out 500 seat theatre on closing night. The theater was twice the size we ever played in NY so the laughs and the tears were bigger than we had ever heard before. We were on such a high that we really didn't the plane to fly back home.

The show had a second successful run in 2018 and guess what....it's coming back for a third run starting in two weeks on February 17th! Four of the original cast are returning (including our soul mate, Meeri Hernandez who both stars and produces the show.) They will be joined by four new members to our family.

We are so excited and proud of everyone involved and we now our goal is to eventually mount the Spanish version here in NY with a cast direct from Buenos Aires.

Here is just a small sample of pictures from the new production followed by some of our favorite images from the previous production.