Greetings Opening

The cast did a great job last night with an opening night audience just shy of being sold out. Director Phil Counts paced the lobby nervously as the audience filed in. He told me that this is the most difficult part for him. Waiting to see the audience reaction to the play. It is out of his hands now and into the audiences.

I don't outwardly show signs of my nerves but I'm also waiting to see the audience reaction. It doesn't matter how good or bad something is in my mind. It is all up to the audience. I always remember an old saying "You are only as good as your last show." Every time we open a show we have to prove ourselves again. High School Musical was a terrific show. Maybe even Market House Theatre's best ever from a performance standpoint. But that show is now part of the theatre's history and we are here at opening night again having to prove ourselves.

As the Executive Director I often worry about the subject matter of the play. Greetings is a comic drama about family and faith. It is definitely not the Sanders Family Christmas onstage. Greetings is a family portrait drawn with wit and with a tinge of regret and resentment. We will see a very funny segment that it is followed up by a powerful dramatic segment. Tom Dudzick the playwright does this really well. We may be laughing at the dad in the show yelling out the front door calling all the neighbors atheists because they didn't put up Christmas lights, and the next moment we are watching as a young woman recounts the death of her little sister and why she doesn't believe in God or miracles. The playwright brings us back and forth in a discussion of faith and family that hopefully allows us to ask the questions that the main character Andy poses to us -" Are the old ways worth holding onto? Do some ideas deserve rethinking?" Playwright Tom Dudzick comes up with answers for his characters that give us hope along with a miracle or two, but he doesn't let us, as audience members, off the hook from asking ourselves those same questions. Andy goes on to say "Because no matter what we tell our kids, in thirty years they'll be asking the same questions all over again."

In a Christmas season full of shopping we sometimes let the shiny packages blind us and forget to look around us for the miracles of faith and hope and love.