Post Smoke

Congratulations to Sarah Bynum and Alex Roman on their wedding last Saturday evening at Grace Episcopal Church. Everyone at MHT wishes you many years of happiness!


Smoke on the Mountain Homecoming ended its run last Sunday with a weekend of sold out performances and a run of standing ovations. The cast received a standing ovation every performance. Most of the performers know that I'm a firm believer in short curtain calls. Just about any show can get a standing ovation if the curtain call lasts long enough. A true measure is when the audience is standing before the last person walks onstage for a curtain call. For many of the performances of Smoke the audience started standing when the first performers walked on stage to take a bow and in some cases even before the lights came up for the curtain call. Congratulations to the cast on an outstanding performance. Cindy Miller did an outstanding job with the music for the production.

It was nice to have Emily Yocum and Maria Miller fill in as Weldon and Eldon. For the final performance I had them come out at intermission and draw the winning raffle number. Emily was 4 years old when she first appeared on the MHT stage in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Maria was 9 years old when she first stepped on the MHT stage in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. Both of them have grown up doing plays and are now High School students and extremely talented performers. It was also nice to have Lisa Humphrey Wynn and Debbie Burnett back with us for the final two weeks of performances after a multi-year hiatus.


We are still totaling up the numbers but preliminary estimates show that Smoke did significantly better than projected single ticket sales. This is a great way to kick off the season. We had such high demand that Business Manager, Marsha Cash, who was working the box office by herself during the day sometimes had 3 callers on hold and people lined up a the ticket window. We have decided to bring Box Office Assistant, Rhiannon Dodds, in for more hours to help cover the box office during peak times. We really missed having one more full time person in the box office that we had last year with Alexis Davis. Alexis has kept in touch and tells us things are going well for her in her new job at SIU. We are trying to streamline our online ticketing so that audiences can more easily purchase tickets through the website instead of having to call the box office during peak box office times.


Business Manager, Marsha Cash, and I are working on ways to get class registrations and other events also on the website for easier access. You can buy tickets for the Secret Life of Girls and the River City Ghost Walking Tours online right now and have the tickets waiting for you when you arrive for the event. Someday (not yet!) we may even be able to do exchanges online for our season ticket holders, but that is a much more difficult process.


Wednesday we get the official word on our grant from the Kentucky Colonels about our seating campaign. We have a board meeting Wednesday evening to make plans for the purchase. The board is getting ready for the big party on Sat. October 3 for Gala Trolley Ghost Tour kickoff. The second draft of the tour script has been sent to the guides and we are in the process of walking, riding, and working through the final details. Our guides our Jody Smith, Marsha Cash, Kim Yocum, Phil Counts, Chris Black, and myself. We've had some school groups also book daytime ghost tours.



Our annual fund drive will kick off the week after fall break. Cindy Miller has been in several days now working with the database so we can contact past and present members to tell them about all the great things going on at the theatre.



Although we just closed a show Sunday, 24 hours after we finished striking the set we met onstage for the first rehearsal for Tom Dick and Harry. Last night was the first read through of the script. There were times the cast was laughing so hard that they couldn't speak. The show is a farce comedy with lots of mistaken identity and fast moving physical comedy. We start staging the first scene tonight. The cast for Tom Dick and Harry is Al Knudsen, Chuck Wilkins, Landon Baker, Sabrina Beck, Victoria Demarco, Diane Byrd, Jim Roush, Phil Counts, and Shawn James with Denise Bristol as the Assistant Director.



Next Sunday is the technical rehearsal for Secret Life of Girls. Although we produced the show last May it is still just as much work to get the technical elements ready as doing it for the first time. Lights have to be hung and focused and projectors re-hung and programmed. In addition we are doing several school matinees for the show so the cast and crew will have over 10 performances into 5 days.



We are in rehearsal for Reunion at Hippie High to be presented by the Murder for Hire troupe as a fundraiser for the Caldwell County High School Junior Class. Valerie Pollard, Renie Barger, Audra Hall, April Cochran, Marsha Cash, Fowler Black, Steve Schwetman, Chip Bohle are in the cast for that show.



Story Theatre will begin rehearsals within the next few weeks to prepare for its fall tour! That's four cast members out touring for a month. That is 5 productions along with Footlights classes and our new classes of Theatre Games for Adults offered by Joey Judd and workshops on auditioning, script analysis, and technical theatre, that I'm offering all in October. I'm tired just writing this! But the exciting thing is that we have so many people who want to participate! The energy and enthusiasm about the theatre is very high.