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MIDDLETOWN: HOW TO MAKE A ‘DIAMOND’

MHSS playElias Kotsis and Jessica Fisher (center) are featured in the cast of Middletown High School South’s THE DIAMOND AS BIG AS THE RITZ, director Alexis Kozak’s own adaptation of the story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

If comedy is as hard as they say it is, then satire (which the conventional wisdom says “is what closes on Saturday night”) is even harder — and a diamond, whether in the rough or on the résumé, is the hardest thing known to mankind.

When Middletown High School South theater arts teacher Alexis Kozak got down to selecting the school’s fall dramatic production for the 2014-2015 academic year, he bypassed the tried-and-true tropes of the community-stage canon — gambling in favor of a never-before-presented script, by a largely unknown scribe: Alexis Kozak.

With a Masters degree in playwriting — and a portfolio of original work that includes the full-length Zero Days Since the Last Miracle (produced last year by The Black Box, the Asbury Park-based arts collective on whose board he sits) — Kozak is hardly a dilettante dabbler. And his script, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, comes backed by the full faith and credit of one of the great American authors, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in 1920s Montana, this adaptation of Fitzgerald’s “Jazz Age” novella follows innocent prep-school boy John T. Unger (Elias Kotsis) as he accompanies his ultra-rich friend Percy Washington home for the summer to his family chateau — where he discovers that the source of the family’s wealth is a secret worth dying for.

“I did see this as an opportunity to beat Broadway to the punch,” says Kozak about Diamond, which has just come into the public domain, (and is also being adapted as a Broadway musical, purportedly scheduled for opening later this year). “I have always loved Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby…so, in some ways, this is a love letter to him and his work.”

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IN oRBit: THOMAS LOOKS BEYOND THE BOX

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Today’s edition of Red Bank oRBit welcomes the Newark Black Film Festival back to Monmouth County — while bidding a bittersweet buh-bye to the person who’s been most instrumental in making it happen here for the past three years.

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We’ve long known Terri Thomas (right) as a driving force behind the nonprofit Black Box Asbury Park group, and in particular the annual Women’s Arts Festival it’s been staging each year. For four years now, pretty much anyone involved in the local arts scene has identified this actress/ activist/ advocate/ editor/ opera singer as Community Arts Director for the Red Bank-based Monmouth County Arts Council. When we got word that Terri will be leaving the Shore for Eugene, Oregon at month’s end, we just had to look her up for an informal interview on her future plans, as well as the State of the Arts in the post-Terri era.

Also today, an appreciation of one of the Shore’s quirkiest crannies of creative energy — the Shore Institute of the Contemporary Arts, and its founding father Douglas Ferrari. We’ve got a look back at last week’s big Fifth Anniversary party for SICA, as well as a look ahead to this weekend’s opening reception at the former cannery turned uncanny ideas factory. It’s all here, suitable for framing and on view ’round the clock in Red Bank oRBit!