Title: The Messiah of Midtown Park

 A Contemporary Comedy-Drama (Screenplay)

Author:  Rolf Gompertz

ISBN: 0595328563

Tenderly Wrought Screenplay-in-a-Book

Tickles the Heart and the Funny Bone

The following review was contributed by:

CAROLYN HOWARD-JOHNSON &CLICK TO VIEW   Carolyn  Howard-Johnson's Reviews

Carolyn Howard-Johnson is the award-winning author of: This is the Place, Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered and THE FRUGAL BOOK PROMOTER: HOW TO DO WHAT YOUR PUBLISHER WON'T

After reading The Messiah of Midtown Park, I may take to reading screenplays more frequently. With all the narrative trimmed away like the fat from a T-bone, they literally clip along. I read Messiah in a single sitting.

Mind you, it is not only the screenplay format that kept me rooted to my chair by the fire. It was also because this is a story very tenderly wrought. The characters are sensitively drawn and thoroughly multidimensional. It also had me smiling immediately, laughing out loud by the second page. Okay, it was an author joke that elicited the guffaw, but I loved all the humor-- the Hollywood humor, even though I’ve spent little time among Hollywood types. The Jewish  humor even though I’m not Jewish. I loved the gentle barbs aimed at religions that tend to think they have all the answers, even though I never found one that did.

 Messiah, is a treasure. Like plays and screenplays, it is an uncut jewel waiting to be brought to life by a talented director; I am thinking that a savvy producer would find much that would draw the requisite crowds. The book also includes several inspirational essays and a poem by the same author. This is--obviously--something not seen often in books but it works. The subjects are related and the later pieces give a reader insight into the screenplay itself.

 I’m also glad I chose this time of year to read this work. This little play may have been released just in time to remind us all of our own part in a greater production and how, as The Messiah of Midtown Park would say, we must “Bloom Where We Stand.”