Berton’s love affair with popular music began the day he was born. This is due, some say, to the fact that he was born with a transistor radio glued to his ear. It was to this lucky state of being in the 1970s that Berton ran smack into Doug Fieger and destiny.

Aside from being a very talented vocal arranger, his renown with a guitar has led him to tour with the likes of Robbie Krieger, Bette Midler, the Cowsills and Sarah Brightman.

In the 1990s he made a conscious attempt to break free into a new entertainment field. He started to write screenplays. He developed a screen play with his friend Tom Schulman, the Oscar winning screenwriter of “Dead Poet’s Society” and “What About Bob?”. Tom thought the screenplay was very good but Berton wanted to stretch his compositional skills even further. He also wanted to utilize his vast background of different styles of musical _expression. Musical Theatre seemed the perfect fit. This idea led him, in 1993, to the Lehman Engle Musical Theatre Workshop in L.A. Where he states he learned “the ropes, the ABC’s, the nuts and bolts of writing for the musical theatre stage.”

Says Berton, “It’s a remarkably rewarding and remarkably difficult artistic discipline. When it pays off and a hall full of people laugh at the right time, and lustily cheer a song, the goosebumps I get as a writer rivals anything I have every gotten as a rock and roll performer.”

It’s at the Lehmen Workshop that he met up with Rob Muerer. He and Rob Meurer have written three musical comedies. The first show, “The Party’s Over,” received productions in Chicago and La Mirada. The second show, “Jungle Man! “, has had two hit productions at Stage One in Wichita, in 2000 and 2002. “Robin Hood: The Untold Story,” is the teams third effort and was the hit of the esteemed ASCAP/Disney Workshop in 2001. They are currently working on a fourth.

“Musical comedy,” states Berton, “is most likely what I’ll be doing for the rest of my life.”

Berton hails from Van Nuys, California and was born December 13,1953.

For more information please visit: http://www.bertonaverre.com/