Merry Christmas

We wish you and yours the very best for this Christmas Season, and have a blessed New Year!

Four of our MasterWorks theatre
students on Times Square after opening
Off-Broadway.
For the first time we brought the MasterWorks theatre program to New York for performances Off-Broadway. You can find a full report at RichDrama.com/MWF.


This year I performed in two films (Christmas Grace and Beyond the Mask), performed, spoke and/or taught in 14 states, plus Toronto, Puerto Rico, Transylvania and London for a total of about 225 appearances. Thanks so much for all of your prayers and support through all of that!


Rich with Ian Sadler, organist for
Chariots of Fire.
My performance of Beyond the Chariots in Toronto was bookended by Ian Sadler playing the same pieces on the organ as he did in the Academy Award-winning film Chariots of Fire. To hear "Jerusalem" played as it had in the film, just before I walked out to perform my play about Eric Liddell, one of the main subjects of the film, was a very special moment indeed.  Two of the daughters of Eric Liddell also spoke that evening, marking the fourth such performance, starting with Heather Ingham, Eric's middle daughter, speaking after an Off-Broadway performance in 2006. Heather found out I was performing the play at Trafalgar Castle School for girls the following Monday, and she was kind enough to speak there, as well.

Rich with Eric Liddell's daughters
and their husbands.
The highlight of my time in Toronto was when Heather told me upon my arrival about the story told about her in Our Daily Bread, about how her faith had been "rekindled" through a prayer for her aunt which was instantly answered while they were in China preceding the 2008 Olympics, visiting the key places Eric and Flo Liddell had lived.

Puerto Rico, Transylvania and London were all during the two weeks of the Summer Olympics.

In Puerto Rico I taught with fellow board members of Christians in Theatre Arts at a conference for applied theatre practitioners. In London we had four performances in various parts of the city, and three were within five miles of the Olympic Pavillion. We were surprised that Transylvania was the highlight of the trip. We found ourselves laughing at everything, and it occurred to us that, in a land scarred by persecution, we were bringing healing through our laughter.

By the end of the second week of the Olympics we had reached people from 30 nations and every inhabited continent.

We're finalizing a documentary on how drama ministered to people across cultures and languages during the Olympics. Once that's finished, we'll post the announcement through our emailing: RichDrama.com/Updates.

Catch a sneak preview at CITA.org/PR12.


Indescribable, the film in which Joyce and I play husband and wife was chosen as a semi-finalist for the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival (SAICFF), where it will be screened in February. Alone Yet Not Alone, in which I play a land speculator, will open in theatres April 5, and For the Glory, in which I play a soccer coach to a future Olympian, seems on the verge of a release date announcement on Facebook.

Have a blessed 2013. Wherever you are in the world, I'd love to bring one of my one-man plays and/or workshops to your community: RichDrama.com.

At the Eric Liddell Legacy Breakfast with world-record breaking Olympic gold
medalist Madeleine Manning Mimms, with whom I performed during the
Beijing Olympics, and Ashley Null, who served as a chaplain during
previous Olympics.

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