Six Decades in the Making

It starts in Newport, Rhode Island, with Newportant Studios, live staged artistic collaborations for print, canvas, film, and web, built around the work of local artist William Heydt. Newport R.I.: The Series, the Newportant People Series, and Newport City Limits Magazine grew out of that same effort, producing, marketing, and promoting original art, film, music, and theatre made in Newport. It was not called Erbana Productions yet, but it was the same instinct already at work, take the story in front of you and find it an audience.

The directing career runs alongside it and past it, twenty-seven productions since 1994 across Florida, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, from Neil Simon and Sondheim to four separate stagings of Yasmina Reza’s Art over a decade. Sixteen stage roles as an actor, six film credits including Amistad, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, and You’ve Got Mail, and three television appearances round out a working life spent as often in front of the footlights as behind them, directing a scene one season, standing in it the next.

Erb Publishing came next, founded in August 2026 as a play publishing and licensing house for schools, community theaters, and independent producers, direct submissions, no reading fees, an eight to twelve week response. The catalog reached 155 plays within its first year, and four titles, Standing Room Only, Corruption Has a Face, Cissie, and Dance of the Woolly Monster, are now in print, with more added regularly.

The songwriting runs underneath all of it, roughly 180 original songs built up over years, largely private until a 19-song selection became the spine of Unbridled, a two-act memoir musical tracing one life from a Norfolk, Virginia childhood in 1968 through to the love spent a lifetime looking for. The full script draft was complete by September 2026, a musical built from songs that already existed rather than the other way around.

Erbana Productions is what all of that adds up to now, the parent name for the plays, the productions, the publishing house, and the music. Building Paradise, the true story of Venice, Florida’s founding, is driving the current casting push alongside Wedding Secrets and A Rainy Night in Hollywood, and Erbana Repertory Theatre, a new audio-first producing company, is already in development for what comes after. Sixty years on, it is still the same instinct from Newport, take the story in front of you and find it an audience.