The Actors Reading Room will present a reading of Ed Wood: The Musical! at OutCentral on Sunday June 22 at 2pm. This pre-production script reading of the musical, a tribute to one of America’s most alarming and legendary filmmakers, will come at the tail end of Film-Com, the weeklong film industry convention here in Music City.

“It’s a Sunday afternoon matinee,” said Jaz Dorsey. “I thought we’d do a matinee, kind of in the spirit of the great 50s B-movie going experience. We’re at the end of Film-Com so we thought this would be a great way to end the week by celebrating this iconic director who thought for himself and was outside the box.”

“The whole thing about a new play reading,” added Dorsey, “is when a playwright finishes a script, they need very much to put that script into the hands of actors to hear it come alive. And then if they feel good about it, then the next step is to get those actors together and do a reading where you invite people to come in and hear the script as it’s read and experience this early stage of development, and kind of get hooked on the project and hopefully become fans of it and also give their feedback as to whether things work, if there are any questions that they have that were not answered.”

Rick Tell, the creator of Ed Wood: The Musical! who wrote first the entire musical score and then a script to accompany it, told Joe Blevins in this extended and comprehensive blog post that his intention is to have the musical eventually produced here in Nashville.

Jaz Dorsey: “People that go to the theater are used to going into a theater and seeing a play and not really thinking about what it took to get that play to the point that someone would produce it.” Here, then, is a great opportunity to pull back the curtain and see this new musical in its development stage.

graphic via Dead 2 Rights blog