An Eight Hour Series

Co-produced by Gary Ungar

Hugh Hamilton, a handsome young Londoner of Anglo-Irish descent, enjoys a life of travel, ease and pleasure. He doesn’t think too hard about the financial arrangements that makes this agreeable existence possible. But all that changes when his grandfather becomes too ill to run the family estate in Ireland and Hugh is dispatched to Connemara at the height of the Great Famine.

There, he comes to understand the scope of the distress endured by his family’s tenants and his own role in perpetuating it.  The decisions he makes bring him into bitter conflict with the estate’s land agents and with his own callous and cash-strapped father. But they put him in touch with the heroic in himself and imbue his life with new meaning and consequence.

His growing love for Delia Cunningham, whom he meets in Ireland, is one cause for this transformation. But Delia is entangled in a web of her own, with a brother serving the British Crown in India, another involved in political violence, and a third under her care. The events of the story launch her on an epic journey to the tenements of New York’s Lower East Side and ignite in both Hugh and Delia an abiding love that forever changes their lives.

Book and Lyrics by Maureen Foley

Music by Séamus Egan

City of Dreams, a stage musical, was inspired by the journey in 1914 of a young bare-knuckle boxer named Michael Conway from County Mayo, Ireland, to Butte, Montana, to work in one of the copper mines. Michael was the great uncle of the musical's composer, Séamus Egan.

City of Dreams explores the plights of immigrants, of descendants of slaves, and of those who do society's hardest, dirtiest, and most dangerous work. Its music - from Celtic-inspired reels and ballads, to spirituals, to roots-infused porch music and songs of the American dance hall - examines the ways in which the brave and ambitious sacrifice themselves so that those who come later may thrive.

City of Dreams explodes with the vitality of a Rocky Mountain mining camp, crackling with the energy of the American labor movement as the world hurtles toward the Easter Rising and World War I.

City of Dreams grew from roots in the Irish session, which drew rural communities together in kitchens and pubs to pass long evenings with music, dance, poetry and storytelling.  Our goal is much the same: to celebrate our common humanity with an intimate, captivating, and thoroughly explosive live experience.

Learn more here:

https://www.cityofdreamsthemusical.com/

In Development

It's early December in gentrifying Brooklyn...

Residing at 124 St. Ambrose Place, Clinton Hill

HUNTER, 7, and HUDSON, 5, cared for primarily by JULIAN, a British musician and manny, and ALMA, the family's housekeeper.

Residing at 126 St. Ambrose Place, Clinton Hill

CIARAN, an Irish expat, his wife MADDY, a French blogger and retail entrepreneur, and their children ORLA, 6, and JAMEY, 5.  Oh, and CIARAN’s visiting aunt, MARGARET.

Residing at 128 St. Ambrose Place, Clinton Hill

HENRY, family patriarch and longtime brownstone owner, his daughters ROSE and RUBY, his grandson, ELROY, 12, and granddaughter, LILY, 9.

Working at PS. 20. Clinton Hill

RADHIKA, a second grade teacher, SOFIA, the school nurse, and ANDREW, a Vermont-born art teacher.

Working at Hydrangea Bakery, Greenpoint

TESSA, the bakery's owner.

Add love, romance, heartbreak, longing, and a grade school Christmas/Kwanzaa/ Hanukkah/Solstice Pageant.

Mix.

Winner:  Grand Jury Prize for Best American Independent Film, Hamptons International Film Festival

Co-produced by Scout Productions

Starring Katharine Ross, Patricia Kalember, Brian Delate, and Stephanie Castellarin

"More essential than so much of what's on view today. [It] lets us look at ourselves with an acuity we'd love to recover for good." 

Will Joyner, The New York Times

"Modest coming-of-age film packs a wallop because the crises in the life of its young protagonist turn out to really matter....a remarkable performance...a strong script with believable characters...pic works through understatement and an accumulation of small but telling moments...performances are all on the mark...adding to the film's pro polish."                                                                                                  

Daniel Kimmel, Variety

"It's the extraordinary performance that Foley draws from [Stephanie] Castellarin that gives the film its vital center...For all its finesse and emotional veracity, Home Before Dark is above all generous as it revisits some keenly felt personal history and ties together its loose ends with love and empathy."                                                                                               

Jay Carr, The Boston Globe

Soundtrack by Séamus Egan

Music by Sam Amidon and Assembly

Co-produced by small angst films

A film about finding the path that sets you free, AMERICAN WAKE tells the parallel stories of a fireman and a musician, both discovering the difference between what’s expected of them and the men they really are.

Jack (Billy Smith) has fulfilled the dream of his late father, a Boston cop, by becoming a decorated firefighter. But now, in the aftermath of a blaze that claimed his closest friend in the squad, he is struggling to make sense of his life. And of his feelings for a beautiful young woman on a journey of her own.

Niall (Sam Amidon) is a accomplished fiddle player who is offered the chance of a lifetime: he can have everything his father ever wanted for him, if only he gives up everything he ever wanted for himself.

An “American wake” was a party, held on the eve of an Irish immigrant’s journey across the sea. Joyous and yet infused with the grief of a permanent parting, it marked the moment when one bid farewell forever to an old way of life, in order to make way for the new.

Co-produced by Element Productions and Cronin & Company

Susan Goodwin Komen was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1976, at the age of 36.  Before she died, she made her sister, Nancy, promise to do everything she could to try to put an end to breast cancer.

The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation is how Nancy Brinker kept her promise.

The Komen Foundation’s “Race For The Cure” and other community-based initiatives raise funding for local programs and services. To foster and sponsor research on an international scale, the Foundation turns to corporate partners.

“For The Cure” tells the story of how a promise made and kept has brought hope and support to tens of thousands of breast cancer survivors and their families. And led to vital scientific breakthroughs in the effort to understand and eradicate the disease.