Laughter and loud speakers…
July 16th, 2008
It was a pretty darned good weekend for the Mountain Shakespeare Festival!
“You Can’t Take It With You” had the best opening of any show I have ever directed and I was actually able to enjoy the experience! Normally, I make an expectant father look relaxed, but in this case I felt that the show as completely ready for an audience. And it was, delighting the opening night crowd in the Pine Mountain Club Gazebo.
The next two performances could have dropped off a bit but they didn’t. The matinee was solid and the Saturday night show was, in my view, a seminal event for our Festival. It was a truly realized performance and reached a level of professional quality we can all be proud of.
There is always things that can be improved but the audience and actors shared in a wonderful give and take and the play really “sang.”
“The Comedy of Errors” is also coming into its own. We only had the one performance on Sunday and the actors really stepped up against tons of distractions that included, right at the outset of the play, a party on loudspeakers literally next door that culminated in a delightful serenade over the sound system. Thank goodness the woman was such a good singer!
Throw in passing 2-stroke off road bikes and rumbling mufflers and you get the idea. I am proud of the cast for enduring and putting in a pretty good show with all that to contend with.
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2 Comments Add your own
1. Shannon Norris | July 16th, 2008 at 11:17 pm
Peter, you’re such a good sport. We couldn’t hear our cues backstage during Comedy of Errors due to the party next door!
2. David Stenstrom | July 22nd, 2008 at 6:28 am
Focus, focus, focus at the Mountain Shakespeare Festival! We witnessed such concentration at the performance of Comedy and each actor triumphed. I haven’t had this much fun doing rep in a very long time!
It is inspiring that here in the Gazebo, in a place that no one has ever heard of, Pine Mountain Club, such skills only dreamed of in many of the waiver theatres in Hollywood are happening here, just because actors enjoy doing it. The joy of creating a character, the joy of making an audience laugh, maing them cry, making them realize perhaps something in themselves, or something that they want to have inside of them…it is such a priviliege.
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