It has been a wild week since last Saturday. We had the technical rehearsal for Wedding Belles on Sunday afternoon. Kathy Keeney has been working every day this week on putting plants and flowers on the set for the show. She has done a great job of making a garden look overgrown and yet with a few touches having it clean up nicely for the final scene of the show. Tonight was the preview performance of the show with about 10 family and friends of the cast and crew watching the final dress rehearsal to give the actors the sense of how an audience reacts before opening night tomorrow. Diane Byrd, Marsha Cash, Sue Fletcher, Audra Hall, and Kris Shanks are all doing a great job with the show.
This is one of those prop shows that the actors are constantly having to make sure they accomplish certain tasks at certain times. Audra has to put on 3 dresses in a short time so they can comment on each dress just as other actions occur in the script. Table clothes and dishes, vases of flowers, quilts, cakes, ice cream and all sorts of things are going on. Not to mention the wigs, hats, gloves, purses, and packages they all have to carry during the show.
Pied Piper has their final dress rehearsal tomorrow morning and then performs Friday morning at Farley elementary here in Paducah. The cast rehearsed in costumes for the first time today along with most of the sound. Tomorrow we add wireless microphones and then its on the road for the next 4-5 weeks. Miki Abraham, Sydney Hughes, Julie Price, and I are in the cast singing and dancing in a 35 minute musical audience participation show.
The Death of Dr. Pepper has their final dress rehearsal Thursday at 4. We ran the show twice today and used the guns for the first time. It is always a little scary the first time the actors have to shoot someone so we work with the blanks and the gun safety issues. Renie and Don Barger, April Cochran, Roy Hensel, Julie Price and Steve Schwetman are in this particular show that is going to be performed for the Community Christian Academy Prom on Friday night. Julie is doing double duty acting in Pied Piper and Dr. Pepper. She is so much fun to watch in both shows! The whole cast for Dr. Pepper has worked hard to memorize lines and action for the show with very few rehearsals due to spring break. The funniest moment for me was watching Renie, Julie and April who all have three very different accents in the play keep switching their accents. April has the same problems I do in that if she is next to someone with an accent she picks it up. During one point in tonight's rehearsal she was Italian, Swedish, German, and Russian. Add that to Renie's Southern and Julie's kind of Brooklyn/Valley Girl/ who knows what accent and you have a laugh riot.
The big news this week was also that MHT was featured in the National Endowment for the Arts Quarterly Magazine as the cover story. This was a real tribute to hard work of the MHT staff and volunteers behind the scenes to keep MHT running and to produce the many shows that we do each year. I've posted a copy of it on our face book page.
Please make plans to attend Wedding Belles which opens tomorrow!
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