Joey Madia, Storytelling and Immersive Design Services

  In yesterday’s blog post (https://www.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/1027346460735612910/8538390204805161713), I traced the changes in the flawed lead male character in TV and film over the past few decades, arriving at the present, where many of these characters are, sadly, “irredeemably broken.”  Hoping for something better from The Greatest Showman, I had been planning to see it for awhile. Having a background in musical theatre and being a fan of the similarly styled Moulin Rouge, I had purchased some of the songs from the film months before. I am also a fan of Hugh Jackman. He is one of the rare Hollywood leading men who can act and sing, do drama and comedy, and and do it all very well.  A few nights before my first watch of The Greatest Showman, I had watched the NBC “live concert” of Jesus Christ Superstar, which was diminished by John Legend’s lack of acting chops—a must for anyone playing Jesus in this show. And who can forget Gerard Butler’s lack of ability t...

  Several years ago, I began to notice a trend in the lead male characters in American television shows. In 2014 HBO’s The Leftovers ’ Chief of Police, Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux) and AMC’s The Walking Dead ’s ex deputy Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) were both deeply flawed heroes, struggling in post-Apocalyptic worlds to face the darkness without it filling the already-prevalent cracks in their psyches and souls. This had been done a decade earlier with a man on the other side of the law, in a different kind of dying world: Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini). Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles) on CW’s long-running Supernatural is another example of what I found to be a challenging new take on the lead male character—one that was clearly in step with society’s probing and pervasive questions about what it means to be male in the twenty-first century.  As a writer who has been asking this question all my life—especially since my college years, when I attended a liberal arts college ...

Some things are just meant to be. In August of 2009, my wife and I decided to take a trip to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, where there was a museum dedicated in part to the Mothman Prophecies--a book by Fortean researcher John A. Keel, which had been adapted for the big screen, starring Richard Gere, Laura Linney, and Will Patton in 2002.  We loved the movie and had gotten the book on which it was based. When we bought 3 acres in a WV "holler" in 2007, one which we built a house for our family of five, my wife Tonya asked me if I wanted to go to the Mothman Museum, which was only two and a half hours away. It took me two years to say yes.  What we experienced that weekend in July in the so-called TNT area--a former WWIII munitions factory area which features about 100 concrete "igloos"--was truly life changing and we have talked about our 2 and a half hours of missing time in our books and others, and during countless radio interviews, podcasts, and conference and ...

Several years ago, I was given my county Chamber of Commerce’s President’s Award. The following day, a newspaper article about the award opened with the question, “What does business have to do with the arts?” This is a question that many of us who have produced theatre and immersive experiences have been asked. My answer? Just about everything.  The arts are a key aspect of city revitalization and the so-called Creative Economy and have been proven in report after report to bring a considerable Return on Investment to communities (see, e.g., http://www.nasaa-arts.org/Research/Grant-Making/Fact-Sheets/ROIFedStateFactSheet2011.pdf).  Downtown revitalization, increased traffic to businesses, bringing young families to older communities, and new ways to look at persistent problems are all contributions made by arts organizations and arts entrepreneurs. As a matter of fact, these boons to local business by the theatre company I founded 19 years ago, Seven Stories, is why I was rec...

In 2018, after the success of 2 five-star Escape Rooms in North Carolina that I co-designed and wrote, I was commissioned to write two articles about designing Escape Rooms like cinematic thrillers for Stage 32 and Creative Screenwriting: https://www.stage32.com/blog/7-steps-for-writing-escape-room-narratives-and-how-to-find-opportunities-to-write-them-1597 https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/thrill-writing-escape-room-narratives-contained-thrillers/ The Creative Screenwriting article was republished by the International Screenwriters Association in 2021: https://www.networkisa.org/screenwriting-articles/view/writing-escape-room-narratives-as-contained-thrillers  After those articles were published, I received an offer to design an Escape Room with a unique challenge: rather than a dedicated space, it had to be designed for quick setup and takedown in a bed and breakfast cottage in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland, that catered to tabletop gamers.  This was my first opportuni...

It could very well be that the last thing the world needs is another how-to blog article on writing. Then again, despite all of the courses, structural models, writers-on-writing, and “Here’s the Secret to crafting the perfect story!” proclamations and prescriptions out there, it seems that many writers find the act of Writing—the mystical, alchemical act of getting words on the page—to be SO HARD. Now… don’t get me wrong—the total process of Brainstorming, Writing, Editing, and Revision IS hard. Pulling a story from the ether (Elizabeth Gilbert) or like a fossil from the ground (Stephen King) is not for those given easily to Frustration. But it is not quite the war Steven Pressfield would have us believe, nor is it simple as making a ham and cheese sandwich. All around me I see writers struggling for daily word count. They read Stephen King’s how-to books and try to emulate his technique; they hear that walking helps, that even when a writer is mowing the lawn or lounging in a hammock...

The Cannon and the Quill series combines extensive historical research with mystery and the paranormal. Based on the author’s long-running stage show, The Cannon and the Quill is part of the ongoing Stanton Chronicles.  Book One: We All Be Jacobites Here 1715. While the Scottish Jacobites fight to put James of the House of Stuart on the British throne, a war has begun in the Caribbean, fought by the forgotten few, the Republic of Pirates, led by Benjamin Hornigold. Only 16 years old, Angus MacGregor, nephew of the Highland outlaw, Rob Roy, arrives in Nassau in the Bahamas to help further the cause. Joined by Joseph Stanton, running away from indentured servitude in Boston, Angus embarks on an adventure that brings him face to face with the pirates of the Golden Age: Charles Vane, “Black” Sam Bellamy, and the most famous of them all: Edward “Blackbeard” Thache. Mixing history with the supernatural, The Cannon and the Quill celebrates the fight of those who have little against those ...

(NOTE: This is one of my New Mystic Alchemy pieces from 2004.) Somewhere, between the sacred silence and sleep Disorder, disorder, disorder (System of a Down—“Toxicity”) I’ve been accused of having a racing mind…the way things come at me on the carnival carousel of hobby-horse thought-rides, I guess that could be right. If it truly is a mental disorder, all this visioning and raging wordsmith creation, I intend to protect it fiercely as I am not interested in a cure. In any given 24-hour span (especially one waltzing the jolly Matilda of my bugged-eyed, eager-fingered insomnia) the thoughts come, bidden or not—dark and light, fine and full, fecund and frightening. Synchroserendipities of cosmic convergence and Universal-linkage spider web coincidences have me bouncing off the walls of my own sketchy Inspirations and muddled philosophical working-thrus… What the hell am I talking about, you ask? The ordering of chaos thru a kaleidoscopic mental disordering of Michael-Mannish film monta...

  Theatre for Young Audiences: Genies, Lamps and Dreams Sinbad, Aladdin, etc. Tour prod. w/YouthStages (Princeton, NJ) 2 Marys, 5 Jacks and One… Willie Winkie, etc. Tour prod. w/YouthStages (Princeton, NJ) Elves and the Shoemaker Emile the Shoemaker Tour prod. w/YouthStages (Princeton, NJ) Rags to Riches Dick Actor’s Cafe Androcles & the Lion Pantalone Actor’s Cafe Charlotte’s Web Templeton Actor’s Café Stage Acting 79 productions, including: The Brothers McWhorter Capt. Henderson Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum Civil War Event Poe: A Haunted Life Poe and 6 of his characters  Seven Stories Theatre Co. Gumshoes Never Cry Dirk Manzman Seven Stories Theatre Co. In Congress with the Night   Reynold               Seven Stories Theatre Co. Love is a Heart Full of Bullet Holes  Dirk Manzman               Seven Stories Theatre Co. The Dining Room ...

  All beginning writers, having first gotten the urge to tell stories because of their early and persistent love of reading and watching films and TV, are bound to “borrow” from the writers they love. Storytelling luminaries Neil Gaiman (who legacy is now in question; I wrote this essay in 2014) and Stephen King often write and talk about their early influences and how they emulated them, sometimes only realizing years later that they borrowed from their heroes quite freely. King has done pastiches of Sherlock Holmes and has said that if there was no Dracula, there would be no ‘Salem’s Lot. The heavy influence of Shirley Jackson is clear in many of his books and teleplays. My writing mentor in college used to tell us to “steal all you can.” A man of high principles and the chair of the graduate writing program, he certainly was not talking about Plagiarism, and we all knew it. Some writers, on the other hand, such as William Faulkner, were quoted as saying that writers are immoral ...