The great storyteller J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in his introduction to The Lord of the Rings “this tale grew in the telling”. Well the comedy and the drama of “Our Man in Chocolate” grew as it became something else. The sisters were there from the beginning, the younger one working for the older, originally in Perri’s law office. Perri called in a “luck expert” to help her turn around her failing business. The man she called was Cappy, retired but once the oldest pitcher in the majors. Cappy and his dim partner did not last but he did make an opening for Trols Haansnoot, Perri’s uptight office manager, an Icelandic ex-patriot fusspot. Trols was on vacation and then suffered nonexistence to make way for the rise of the importance of Laurel.

At the first public reading, in the summer of 2002, Mr. Engle originated Richard with devastating certitude when Perri was first an ophthalmologist. At that show the author’s own eye doctor was in a seat, perhaps wondering whom she was really seeing on stage. Change blew by once again to drop in Perri's nasal specialty where it has remained - so far.

The unstoppable Vincent Marano helped to steer this play to an inviting home at the Manhattan Theatre Source. But before it could plant its feet, the play needed a few more things. It needed a voice to rant and bawl and rock the heads in the audience. It needed Perri’s confuseness in picking between the surfer and the obsessive man. It needed Laurel’s dire rap song about those talking behind your back in the office. And oddly, it needed Richard’s rhapsody praising his fiancée’s mother. These are lyrics for tunes now coming into existence. So along came Vincent J. Manzo, expert composer, multi-musician to encourage the lyricist to pull verse and chorus from a dusty folder and hand the page gratefully to the music where the first song was folded into a tasty origami too catchy to resist. Hope you really enjoy(ed) it. All props to Vince for it.

Now “Our Man in Chocolate” is due to change again, to something more musical, ever closer to heart of those characters who dangle so helplessly over their open flaws.

The author wishes to thank all the supporters and inspirers and those who sometimes gave with out knowing it. Who gave their names when Musto became Muster and Mrs. Perry the landlady from Hampton Bays became Perri.