Creative Expression
to learn about upcoming classes, workshops, and private coaching.
My decades long career as a creative artist has taken me in so many exciting directions. As a multi-hyphenate, I've been able to explore so many sides of myself creatively, doing what I always knew I was capable of and discovering so much that I never dreamed of for myself. All of my creative endeavors came out of love and necessity. I've always loved storytelling and came into the creative and performing arts as a musician, a sax player. I played competitively all through my high school years and almost 15 years later when I moved to Los Angeles, my first job was a Maybeline commercial in which I...you guessed it...played the saxophone. In my early years, I also discovered acting and singing and have gone on to play roles like Frankie Valli in Jersey Boys, Joseph in Joseph & the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and Nathan Detroit in Guys & Dolls in regional theatres across America. I've sung big band jazz on the high seas on Norwegian Cruise Line, Royal Carribean, and luxury liners. As a kid, I did improv comedy with my friends and eventually, we did a set at the Broadway Comedy Club that landed us a booker and we, at 19, 20 years old, were performing improv at clubs like Ha!, New York Comedy Club, Stand-Up NY, The Gotham, you name it. It was my improv work that landed me an audition for Martin Scorsese's Oscar nominated film, "The Wolf of Wall Street." I can still remember Marty getting up to shake mine and the other actors' hands at the callback and I can remember receiving the phone call from casting director Ellen Lewis when they offered me the job. "The Wolf of Wall Street" was one of those surreal right place right time right skill set scenarios that never would've happened if I hadn't followed my creative curiosity. Still back in high school, I directed an absurdist musical my friend wrote called Starbucks: the musical and I fell in love all over again with the opposite side of the table. I directed short plays in NYC and went out of town directing The Last 5 Years in Lake Geneva. For about four years, I created and ran the 501(c)3 non-profit theatre company The New Benefit Theatre out of my childhood home and produced and directed concerts, plays, and musicals to benefit children's charities. Eventually, I realized that directing was an interpretive art form and I could only take the writing on the page so far. At university, I discovered that I had my own stories and a unique comedic and musical sensibility. The first musical I ever worked on was a big broad musical comedy called Welcome to Shoofly that I co-wrote with Jonny Lee Jr. and eventually also with Joanna Burns & Amanda Duncan. I never dreamed that the first musical I ever co-wrote would be hand selected by Stephen Schwartz for the ASCAP/DreamWorks Musical Theatre Workshop. If you told a young Justin Anthony Long that he and his boyfriend and friend would write a musical web-series, buy a camera, some lights, sound, and video editing equipment and create an 11 episode musical web-series with guest appearances by Broadway and no Screen stars Billy Porter, Laura Osnes, and more, he would've thought you were out of your mind. Or that the show, my first-ever onscreen offering, would be noticed by USA Today and IndieWire as some of the web's best programming, I would've said, "sure, keep dreaming, pal."I've always been a dreamer. During the lockdown covid years, I dreamed up a pop song and enlisted some friends to direct and perform in the music video just because it seemed like fun at the time. I had never written a pop song and had no expectations. When a friend encouraged me to submit the music video to film festivals, I begrudgingly did it, knowing that I was taking something I did for the love of it and opening myself to rejection. But I went ahead and submitted it and the rejections came....but then...something unthinkable happened...I was onboard Royal Carribean Cruise Line singing big band jazz covers of pop songs and stretching out in the gym when I received a curious email from a curator at The Tribeca Film Festival who had a question about my submission. We set a time to call while I was ported in Barbados and much to my surprise, the call was purely for the excitement of them telling me that "Gone Forgotten Year" was an Official Selection and would be screening in the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival. Also during COVID, I became a published writer when Theatre Now printed "The 10-Minute Musical: An Anthology from the Sound Bites Festival" which includes Cookie Soirée by me & Ge Enrique with concept by Jonny Lee Jr.. Music Theatre International optioned it in 2020 and since then, it's gone on to be licensed by over 100 theatres, schools, and community groups in the USA, Canada, and Mexico. When Theatre Now sent me a video of young women in Mexico performing a Spanish translation of something I wrote, I openly wept. I never imagined that my work would be accessible in that way and it made me so happy to know that non-English speaking communities could perform our musical comedy. My writing has taken me to Tribeca Film Festival in NYC, Raindance Film Festival in London, and next week, The Austin Film Festival where an animated comedy pilot I co-wrote with Jonny is a semi-finalist. We never would've written Narky & the Satellites if we hadn't met Chris deFaria, scored pitch meetings with DreamWorks, Animal Logic, Cartoon Network, and dared to dream that we could create an animated series. DreamWorks and Animal Logic executives were introduced to us by colleagues, but one dark day during covid, I cold emailed an exec at Cartoon Network thinking, there's no way this will go through. About a week later, we were pitching them. You just never know and you need to believe. You need to believe in yourself and believe that there are other creative people out there who get you and understand your work. Since college, I've been teaching and sharing what I know at institutions like The Mayo Performing Arts Center, New Benefit Theatre, and The Miracle Project. Now, I'm opening the doors in a more personal way. Join my mailing list for more information on upcoming workshops, seminars, classes, and private coaching.
to learn about upcoming classes, workshops, and private coaching.