Terry Kimmel

Terry Kimmel was born in the Netherlands in 1960 and was three months old when he and his parents moved to the United States. He is an American citizen and he lists his ethnic background as Dutch-Chinese-German-Indonesian. He grew up in Buffalo, NY and has stayed in the WNY area all his life, except for a brief stint of living in Pittsburgh when he attended the Art Institute of Pittsburgh from the fall of 1978 to the spring of 1980. Although he never completed his studies at AIP, Terry is still fond of Pittsburgh. He graduated from Grand Island High School in 1978. One of Terry's many artistic passions is film, but his aspirations to pursue filmmaking is informed by a love for other art forms, including theater and comics. In the 80s and 90s he was regularly active with the small professional theater community in Buffalo. His involvement included acting roles (among them: Thomas in Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All for You, Cletis in Lone Star) and set construction. In 1984, Terry originated the role of Dunder in the original production of It's a Dog's Life, written by his high school classmates, Peter Sham, Randall Kramer and Steve D'Addieco. Sham and Kramer initially conceived It's a Dog's Life as a sort of response to the much more famous and successful international production, Cats, by Andrew Lloyd Webber (the entire cast of characters in Dog's Life are canine, except for one little girl who owns the canine protagonist, Bo). The two friends eventually staged it at Aurora Players, a community theater in East Aurora, NY. During rehearsals, D'Addieco was called in to help out on the book and he was added to the credits. Terry was invited to play Dunder because Sham and Kramer worked with him in various plays in high school. Though Dog's Life is a musical, Terry's forte is not singing (although he can carry a tune), but instead he was known for being funny, though with an odd sense of comic timing. Dunder was a comic sidekick to the villain of the piece, Spike, played by Sham. The success of the production led the trio of creators to be commissioned to write a new musical for a summer repertory theater, the Bristol Valley Playhouse in Naples, NY. Sham had performed at BVP in previous summers and had invited George Sherwood and family (who founded BVP) to see Dog's Life. Sham, Kramer and D'Addieco then wrote Waxworks, a comic thriller set in a wax museum. That opened in the summer of '84 at Bristol Valley Playhouse and Terry originated the role of The Inspector, another comic role. In Buffalo, Terry's experience in theater eventually grew to include some stage management, directing and producing. Randall Kramer went on to found a summer theater company named Summerfare. Over the years, the company evolved to expand into the regular theater season and to eventually focus exclusively on musical productions. The company now operates out of its own theater on the Daemen College campus in Buffalo and is now called Musicalfare, and Kramer remains its award-winning artistic director. In the 80s, Kramer married actress Lisa Ludwig. Ludwig initially was known for her roles in musical theater but she wanted to expand her reputation into straight theater. In 1991, She and Peter Sham decided to mount their own production of Terrence McNally's Frankie and Johnnie in the Clare de Lune and in the process of looking for a director, decided to turn to their friend, Terry Kimmel, to give it a shot. Frankie and Johnnie was Terry's directorial debut and it proved to be extremely successful with audiences and critics. It also helped Ludwig establish herself as a viable candidate for other roles in the theater community. More importantly, from Terry's perspective, it led the way to him and Ludwig forming their own theatrical production company, FreeFall Productions.