<p>Jamie Foreman, who graduated last year with a BFA in MT, is achieving great success and public acclaim with “Realm of the Unreal: The Vivian Requiem” which he wrote while a student. He is an incredibly talented person and a genuine nice guy. Here’s what the critics are saying, from the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer:</p>
<p>UArts Student’s Fringe Work is a Hit</p>
<p>By Howard Shapiro
Inquirer Staff Writer</p>
<p>From the moment he entered the University of the Arts as a freshman, Jamison Foreman, now 21, had this in his head: By the time I graduate, I’ll have written a musical.
“Yeah, yeah,” said his new school friends. We’ll believe it when we see it.</p>
<p>When he became a senior last fall, Foreman had four compositions, lyrics to match, and 20 pages of script, more than a framework. He sang his songs and showed his words to the faculty.</p>
<p>“Yes, yes,” said his mentors. We believe in it. And we’ll see it.</p>
<p>Which his classmates and the faculty did, first at a UArts reading last winter, then (after rewriting) at a school production last spring. And then (more rewriting) in a full-scale show that was a draw at the Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe, which ends its 16-day run this weekend.</p>
<p>Foreman’s musical, the dark and fascinating Realm of the Unreal: The Vivian Requiem, with a haunting score that fuses choral music and stage tunes, is one of those finds that sometimes pop up in the Fringe.</p>
<p>And so is Foreman, a native of the Washington suburbs whose parents, both regional theater actors, encouraged him and whose mother, “from my earliest age, subjected me to Sondheim,” he says.</p>
<p>A few theater companies have approached Foreman about staging their own versions of his 100-minute one-act work. Nothing is concrete, but with a forthcoming first trip abroad in the China tour of Fame, acting jobs in Maryland and Philadelphia, and a new musical under construction, Jamison Foreman - barely old enough to buy himself a legal glass of champagne - is on the theatrical radar.</p>
<p>“It was very surreal,” he says about seeing the Fringe production of Realm of the Unknown at its final performance on Sept. 8, the first night in its run that he was able to get a night off from his current acting gig in Sweeney Todd in Columbia, Md.</p>
<p>“Once I saw it out there, it was so relieving. And I was proud to have other people care about it as much as I do, and to be able to see what they do with it. Some of the best ideas came from suggestions from other people.”</p>
<p>Since the first reading of Realm, in which Foreman builds a stage character on the real-life recluse and outsider artist Henry Darger, Foreman’s friends and teachers have been his unofficial collaborators. His musical about a tortured man who likely suffered from a mental disorder began with an almost uplifting lilt, Foreman says. It ended up a compelling exploration of Darger’s demons.</p>
<p>In high school, Foreman had heard an NPR piece about about Darger, a deeply religious Chicago laborer whose enormous inventory of artwork and 15,000-plus-page fantasy about very young sisters he called the Vivian Girls were discovered after his death in 1973. "I remembered thinking, ‘Oh, that’s an interesting thing,’ " Foreman says.</p>
<p>He rediscovered the story as a college freshman when a friend mentioned Darger. The man, he decided, was grist for a musical. He began doing research.
When he was a junior, another theater student, Elana Boulos, told him she was trying to find an acceptable piece for her senior directing project. “So I said, ‘Why don’t you do my musical?’ She said, ‘Well, how much have you written?’ I told her 25 pages of dialogue and five songs.”</p>
<p>It was the kind of artistic bravura heard often on Broadway and daily in Hollywood. Foreman hadn’t written a thing.</p>
<p>“I completely lied,” he says. “So I had a week to get it into shape. I didn’t sleep. I just wrote and wrote and wrote.”</p>
<p>That was in August. Next, he and Boulos took the work to a faculty meeting that included Charles Gilbert, head of the theater department.</p>
<p>“I always hope students will take these kinds of risks with big, self-initiated projects,” Gilbert says. “Everybody was sort of surprised. We all knew him as a singer and actor.”</p>
<p>With a green light from the university, Foreman finished his first draft; faculty and students discussed Realm with him in depth after the initial school reading. He incorporated suggestions and rewrote portions for the production Boulos directed in the spring.</p>
<p>Its musical director was another senior, Ryan Touhey, who’d decided to start a theater company, another big project that, every few years, some UArts student decides to undertake.</p>
<p>Touhey called his new troupe Parallax Theatre Company, set about trying to collect $20,000, and began to put together a first season. "I said, ‘What about Realm?’ " Foreman recalls, and the deal was struck.
“I really wanted to do something with my company at the Fringe, but I didn’t know what,” says Touhey, who has heard from some audience members that, after seeing Realm, they’d like to donate to Parallax. “It’s been a long journey for the piece in quite a short period of time.”</p>
<p>A week before Realm opened, the actor playing Darger quit to take an out-of-town theater job, and Touhey stepped in. “I never wanted to have my own company to produce work I was actually in,” he says. Nevertheless, he sang the role masterfully.</p>
<p>Rosey Hay, a New York director who taught Foreman and Touhey at the university, directed Realm for the Fringe, with a 12-member cast and pianist. “Any piece in development is going to change and grow and expand and become something different,” Hay says, and Foreman credits her with the ideas that spurred him to the final rewrites (done by e-mail and phone while he was performing in Damn Yankees in Baltimore). Hays “has been an amazing mentor for me,” he says.</p>
<p>Foreman’s second musical will involve a chef’s TV cooking experiences. “I really like food and the Food Channel,” he says.</p>
<p>But he’ll have to write between performances. “I intend to keep on doing both,” he says. “It’s one complete package that satisfies two different needs. As a composer-writer you get to create. As an actor-performer you get to interpret someone else’s stuff.”</p>
<p>He considers the two roles and notes: "It can get scary as a composer-writer. There’s nothing to hide behind. I can’t say, ‘Well, somebody directed me to do it that way.’ "</p>