About Us
MCHM History
MCHM Productions History
Formed in 1985, MCHM was the summer folly of two youths growing up in rural New Jersey. Best friends Michael Carach and Mark Hagan would spend their endless summers rewriting current Broadway shows to create parodies for their friends. Armed with a tape deck and a crude microphone from Radio Shack, the duo would sing along with these songs and compile them into made up shows.
"Borrowing" from shows such as Cats, Dreamgirls, Phantom of the
Opera, Les Miserable, and the Mystery of Edwin Drood, Jellicle Cats became Gullible Brats and the MCHM creative collaboration
was born.
Michael was quite active in the High School drama department and performed in such shows as "Music Man", "Godspell" and "Our
Town." "We learned a great deal about the politics of theatre at an early
age," says Carach, "Our high school director was very professional in the way he treated his casts, but combine that with a
ruthless music director, and the result was an unhealthy learning environment for everyone involved."
In order to feed their creative thirst, Mike and Mark began to assemble their own shows. "It was cut and paste in style, but
the art of it was how we could twist the real meaning of a song and fit it perfectly into our made up script by only changing
certain lyrics. We never put these shows together for anyone but our small circle of friends, but we always dreamt of someday
being able to write a real show from scratch" says Hagan. The MCHM team wrote and compiled some 15 shows before graduating.
At one point Mark Hagan actually built a small play theatre in the loft of his parent's barn. The duo aptly named it "The Barn
Theatre." "We never actually had a performance of a show, but we did manage to start rehearsing a play
called "What Is Reality Sir?" which was an abridged version of Pirandello's "Six Characters in Search of an Author." Hagan
composed original background music for the show. "Actually, the Harvest Moon Ball from Ripper contains a small portion of a
theme I wrote for that play" says Hagan. "I wanted to include it in Ripper as a memento from our past."
So after traveling wildly different career paths some twelve hundred miles apart, the planets have realigned and MCHM has once
again come back together and emerged as a creative force. "There's no doubt about it, we have our eyes fixated on Broadway" says
Hagan. "We both believe so strongly in what we're doing creatively and it has been such a rewarding experience. That to me means
that this is what we are supposed to be doing."