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“Bold, sensitive, and brilliantly witty...honest, outrageous, and screamingly funny..." – Edinburgh Evening News “Miller provides an intelligent and interesting context, genuinely witty and clever lines, and a wholesomeness and honesty both unexpected — under the circumstances — and exhilarating. . . This, besides the verbal brilliance, is where Miller takes Head Games well beyond the genre. His director's program note and the piece in last week's RFT tell the audience in advance what Miller is going to do, but it's like a magician's explaining a trick before he performs it and still amazing his spectators.” – Harry Weber, The Riverfront Times “The
funniest moment in Head Games occurs when a character questions the artistic integrity
of a director who plans to stage a play with gratuitous nudity. The
irony is that the actor expressing these sentiments is gratuitously
nude. . . Miller is an astute critic, and these questions are obviously
important to him. . . The arguments about theater and sexuality are
thought provoking, balanced and often amusing.” – Gerry Kowarsky, St.
Louis Post Dispatch |
New Line Theatre's Out of Line Productions presented the world premiere of the new adult comedy, HEAD GAMES, by Scott Miller, in August
1999, starring Michael Bowdern, Bradley Calise, Michael Deak, Justin Heinrich, Sarah
Laak, Michael Naggi, and Sean Pritchett, and directed by Scott Miller.
Head Games takes comic aim at a number of targets, including the new and growing genre of gay comedies with gratuitous nudity, America's obsession with and fear of four-letter words and male nudity, and the increasingly prevalent use of nudity on stage as a commercial draw.
Head Games is about a birthday party for a thirty-five year old off-Broadway director who's grieving over his advancing age in a youth-obsessed culture, and also over his inability to find a good gay comedy with nudity to fill his theatre company's bank account. The play takes pot shots at many aspects of pop culture at the turn of the new century, but also at itself, questioning the artistic value of the genre into which it fits.
Head Games has also enjoyed successful runs in Los Angeles and
productions by Strawberry
Theatre in London and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival
for four weeks in August 2002, followed by a
United Kingdom tour, a possible Australian tour, and a second London production.
The Edinburgh cast includes Robert Lockhart, Denise Nicholson, Tom Brent, Simon Frewin, Alan Hunter, Nick Smithers, and Pavel Rimburgh, directed and adapted by Jeff Moody.
Playwright Scott Miller has written the book, music, and lyrics for eight musicals. This is his first non-musical play. He has written four books on musical theatre, From Assassins to West Side Story: The Director's Guide to Musical Theatre (1996), Deconstructing Harold Hill (1999), Rebels with Applause (2001), and the upcoming Let the Sunshine In: The Genius of "Hair"; as well as one chapter for the 1997 book Stephen Sondheim: A Casebook, a collection of essays by the leading musical theatre experts in the U.S. Miller writes for national theatre magazines and websites, and has composed music for TV, radio, and industrial films.
Out of Line Productions is the non-musical arm of New Line Theatre, a professional company producing innovative, provocative, issue-oriented works of the musical theatre.
Read the Riverfront Times review of Head Games
Read the Post Dispatch review of Head Games
Read Neal Weaver's feature story on the show in LA Weekly.
Read the Reviews and Other Press about the Fringe Festival production.
For information on producing Head Games, call us at 314-773-6526 or e-mail NewChaz64@aol.com. Head Games contains adult language and content, and full frontal nudity. For info on Out of Line Productions' 1998 production of Party click here. For information on New Line Theatre's regular season, visit the New Line Homepage.