05.12.07

And it was a success.

Posted in Life, the Universe and All that Jazz at 11:46 pm by Meg

WOW, I can not express how much all the kids exceeded my expectations both nights.

Our first performance was at a local retirement village. They have a small stage in their community room. The head of Leisure Services said that we should expect only about 30ish residents to come and most would not stay for a 2 hour show.

So I printed about 100 programs and figured that would cover both nights. I mean our homeschool group has only about 20 active families.

I came home from the first night with less than 10 extra programs.

It wasn’t really quite that large a turn-out. Girl was handing out programs with the help of a couple of the littlest girls and she told me later that the 2 of them were giving programs to every person that walked down the hall, even if they weren’t coming to the show. Oh well.

Any way you slice it, the room was fairly full when we started. We did lose most of the residents at the intermission, but some stayed. And the non-residents that had come for the show stayed. We even got scouted by some other group (no idea who) who were looking for ideas for their drama group.

The show went smoothly, everyone remembered their lines or were able to cover their stumbles smoothly. And the audience laughed and laughed. Puck was amazing. His mother did a word count of his lines and came up with about 1300 words. He had them, and he’s only 10! Hard to believe.

When we meet on Friday for the second performance, the family that is technically the ‘head’ of our homeschool group, reported that one of the residents had been so motivated to call and say that she had really enjoyed it and thought is was well-done. She also identified herself as very knowledgeable about Shakespeare. Though she did ping us about the floating pronunciations used for Pyramus and Hippolyta.

Hey, I couldn’t get them to all even settle on one way to say it, let alone the correct way. It was not a battle I felt was worth fighting.

For the second performance I went ahead and printed more programs. Nearly 70 were taken. Now I know some of the kids took souvenirs, but that still means we had a fairly large crowd. At least much larger than I was really expecting for 20 kids from about 10 families to draw.

Our second show was done at a small theater owned (I think) by the local men’s barbershop chorus. Their building manager was there during the show and couldn’t stop raving about it. He thought that we had out-classed his little theater, and deserved a larger audience. He also said that they would love to have us come back next year and would work with us setting a date.

Since the local children’s theater group also uses their facility to perform, I really feel like he had something to compare us to and liked what he saw.

So it’s done and we’re off to see Spamalot tomorrow, which will be a lot of fun.

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