Theater Times Two

Sorry I’ve gotten behind on the ol’ blog, but I have been sick much of the last week, so I slept a lot.

On Wednesday, April 27th, Mer and I got to go to CVCA’s spring musical, My Fair Lady. I am a big fan of the movie version of the play, so I was very much looking forward to the production. As I have mentioned before, it also adds to the fun that Mer and I know so many of the people on stage.

We took Aunt Mary to dinner and the show as a birthday present for her. We met at the local restaurant Rockne’s, where we had a very good dinner, but Mer and I were disappointed to discover that they had eliminated their normal desserts for these very small served-in-a-shot-glass cakes and mousse. We skipped them – they were not worth the time or money for such a tiny little thing.

Before the show, Mer and I filled out “StarGrams” – you can write a message to a member of the cast or crew, and for 50 cents, it gets delivered backstage; the money gets used as a fundraiser for a missions trip to the Dominican Republic. Between me and Meredith, we filled out forty StarGrams while Aunt Mary read a book. We have a lot of students involved in the theater.

The play itself was excellent. The pit orchestra of about twelve students and a couple of adults got things going with the overture. The music was very good – there were one or two tiny mistakes, but over the course of a 2.5-hour musical (excluding intermission), that was amazing. I certainly could not have done it. The set was well done, and made up mostly of a den/library for Henry Higgins’ home and an exterior set for London. There were some other minor sets along the way as well, but the basic sets alternated between the two.

The cast of the musical was huge – there had to be thirty students involved, and there were a couple of times where they were almost all on stage (and our stage is not very big). The leads did very well, especially with staying in character with accents. It was a great show, and I enjoyed it very much.

On Friday of that week (the 29th), we headed over to Actors’ Summit theater. Mer had “won” four tickets at the CVCA auction to see the last show of the season, plus we had our normal subscriber seats. So, we had six tickets in all. We decided to use the extra tickets to invite our close family and family friends, so we invited Aunt Mary, “Aunt” Zovie, and Ray and Sara George. We though they would enjoy the evening because the show was a musical revue of Rodgers and Hammerstein music in a production called Some Enchanted Evening.

Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote some of the greatest musicals of the 40s and 50s, such as Oklahoma!, State Fair, and The Sound of Music. Needless to say, the music is pretty catchy. The musical revue was quite refreshing in that there was no attempt to make a loose story out of the music – it was just one song into another for about ninety minutes. The music was organized in a clever way so that a sappy love song might be followed by a cynical love song. The singers also acted out what was going on in the song, so there were a number of funny moments (especially in songs like “I  Cain’t Say No”). The music was all provided by a very excellent piano player, and the evening included four different actor-singers, two men and two women.

This revue was by far my favorite of the six or so that I have seen at Actors’ Summit. The music was fun and well done, and the music told its own short stories without the need to try to piece together some plot to tie them into a play. It worked really well. Everyone seemed to enjoy the music, and it was great getting to hang out with friends and family.

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