Steve NewmanSteve Newman is a freelance writer, actor, historian, director, publisher and playwright living and working in Shakespeare's Stratford.
Steve's first play, Tamarind, was produced at The Edinburgh Fringe Festival in the late 1980s, followed by his second, Am I Blue- A Jazz Musical, at the RSC Fringe Festival in 1997.
In the mid-1990s Steve appeared in three Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) productions, most notably Sir Peter Hall's Julius Caesar, as well as writing RSC reviews and features for Theatre magazine.
By late 1997 Steve had, with two other Stratford playwrights, created The Bird of Prey Theatre Company dedicated to new work. In the six years of its initial life BoP produced fourteen new plays by writers from around the world, including five by Steve, two of which – Ancient Pinnacles, and Portrait of the Artist - were later produced at the RSC Summerhouse.
In 1999 Steve directed a musical version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol at Stratford's Civic Hall.
For the last six years Steve has been writing features on military, jazz, and social history, as well as literary and theatrical history for a variety of magazines and online sites, as well as writing two huge ongoing internet serials, which, eventually he intends to publish in book form.
One of the serials, Swann & Parker – The Crime of the Crimea, is a Victorian murder mystery set in the Stratford-upon-Avon of the 1880s, featuring the police detectives Inspector Herbert Merriman Swann, and Sergeant John Parker. These two extraordinary policemen investigate the murder, on the stage of the old Memorial Theatre, of a prominent actor of the day. But nothing is as it seems.
The other serial is Ernest Hemingway: Going The Other Way From Home, which is a Drama-Documentary about the life and work of America's most influential novelist. The serial uses both fact and fiction to weave a fascinating story about the writer. The serial can now be read weekly at The Brooklyn Voice.
Last year Steve, with his wife Hilary, started Newman Books, and have, so far, published three titles: Airman Missing by Greg Lewis (ISBN 978-0-9558699-0-7), which is the true story of World War II bomber pilot John Evans' 114 days behind enemy lines; Hemingway's HOT Havana, A Play by Brian Gordon Sinclair (ISBN 978-0-9558699-1-4), which had its UK premier in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2008; and Walking With Words, A Book of Poetry by Stratford poet Peter Cubitt (ISBN 978-0-9558699-2-1). Other books are planned for 2010.
Steve is also working on several new magazine features about such writers as Richard Hughes, Colin Wilson, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edgar Wallace and George Bernard Shaw. Happily he also continues to write Walt Whitman – The Novel, for The Brooklyn Voice, as well as his feature about the similarities and power of the work of Louis Armstrong and Ernest Hemingway – Louis Armstrong & Ernest Hemingway: Sweat & Genius - and how both not only complimented each other but were at the forefront of the modern movement in art and culture in the first half of the 20th century. Steve will also continue to contribute single features, such as his pieces on playwright Arthur Miller and jazz musician Cecil Payne, as well as RSC theatre reviews for The Brooklyn Voice.
Earlier this year Steve and Hilary re-invented The Bird of Prey Theatre Company and will be producing several of Steve's plays over the next few years, starting with 1651: An Evening With Oliver Cromwell, which will be staged at the Dirty Duck pub in Stratford in October 2009, starring ex-Hollywood actor, writer, director and artist, Garrick Huscared as Oliver Cromwell. The play, which is an-around-the-dinner-table piece, will be directed by Steve, who will also play John Bunyan.
Currently Steve is writing a one-man show for Garrick called Shakespeare: The Lecture Tour, which should be ready for rehearsal by the end of the year.
As an actor Steve recently appeared as Francis Arabin in Ursula Russell's adaptation of Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers, which was staged by the Trinity Players at Holy Trinity Church, which is the final resting place of William Shakespeare.
Steve will be directing one of three short plays for the company in October 2009.
For many years Steve was an oriental carpet buyer and is currently writing a history of British carpets over at his History Man site.
Steve's other sites include:
Steve Newman's Jazz Groove and A Stratford Diary.
And if all of the above wasn't enough he also helps to run Stratford's longest established store, Fred Winter Ltd.
A Look at Brooklyn Jazz Saxophonist Cecil Payne who Died in 2007
With Shakespeare's 445th birthday
Arthur Miller – Playwright & Protagonist
Britain & The USA - A Comparative History
A Review of the new James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, Stratford-upon-Avon Picture House 31st October, 2008
A Review of the RSC's 2008 production of Hamlet at The Courtyard Theatre,