In-Season Chronicle

With only two performances left of our final show of the first season, everyone is feeling all kinds of mixed emotions around here – The Foreigner inspires a kind of joyful, giddy feeling, but we’re also exhausted from this wonderful summer and sad to see it almost at its end.

Of Mice and Men closed to a fantastic audience that included the president of Christopher Newport University, Paul Trible.  As fate and luck would have it, my family and I wound up sitting right in front of him!  It was nice to have the opportunity to chat with him about TRR as a member of the company, but it also meant a lot as a recent graduate to talk to him about my experiences at CNU.  The show was really stellar that night – we couldn’t have asked for a more wonderful closing night.

Putting up The Foreigner during our two-day turnover was a challenge and a half!  Our fantastic crew worked crazy hours to get up the biggest set of the season, and we had a lot of technical work to do in a short amount of time.  All our efforts lead to a thrilling opening night – I’m so glad we’re ending the show on such a high, happy note with this show.  It really is a feel-good experience.  We had a great time at Brian Hutchins’ opening night party – his house was so beautiful nobody wanted to leave!

Between word of mouth and the broad family appeal of The Foreigner, our ticket sales have been picking up and we’re looking forward to a really special experience this Saturday night at our closing.  We still have tickets to sell for our last two performances, though, so if you’re reading this and you haven’t already told everyone you know about TRR – you know what to do!

Well, after getting fantastic pre-show coverage in the Daily Press for Of Mice and Men as well as having some lovely reviewers in the audience opening night, TRR is well on its way to becoming a great presence in our community!

The energy in the audience on opening night was something very special to behold. As the lights went down and Jim and Matthew came into our Barn as Lennie and George, you could feel the world of the play come into complete fruition in front of you – and all around you. I’ve felt that way all throughout the rehearsal process whenever I watch any of our 10 actors work, but to feel it with an audience was unforgettable. The themes of this play are universal yet specific and they touch us all – and I believe they make us grateful for what we have in our lives.

There were a couple performances on this opening weekend where we had light houses; the July 4th weekend is certainly responsible for that, but I can’t think of a more fitting time to put up an American classic with such strong themes of personal freedom and the pursuit of dreams and happiness.

After our opening performance, Bobby & Vicki Freeman were kind enough to open their beautiful home to us for a fantastic opening night party. It was a very welcoming environment for artists – between the art in their home, the food, and the drinks, it couldn’t have been better!

With the show up and running now, I finally had a chance to peek in rehearsal for The Foreigner.  They had their design run through on Thursday evening and I caught the first half hour or so – I’m ready to see the rest!  In particular, seeing Jackie Prucha as Betty Meeks after watching her as Mama (and others!) in Quilters was great fun – she and the rest of the cast are going to have everyone in stitches.

It’s been a great weekend, and we’ve all been working hard – even though we all finally took a day off for the 4th.

Tonight we’re doing something really special – our production stage manager Lara Maerz has put together a reading of the contemporary play Fat Pig by Neil LaBute in our other home besides the Barn, the Ferguson Center for the Arts. We never seem to get enough theatre around here I suppose.

If you haven’t gotten your tickets for Of Mice and Men yet, now is the time to get them. If you have seen the show already, it’s the time to – yes, you guessed it – tell everyone you know! We anticipate a really exciting closing week and we’d love for anyone and everyone to be a part of it.

And it’s hard to believe, but in just 9 days we open our final show, The Foreigner! So pick up your tickets for both of these great American stories, and we’ll see you at the Barn.

Last night we officially opened our premiere season!  Quilters performed to a full house that could not have been warmer or more gracious to us and to the wonderful actresses.  We got a very enthusiastic standing ovation at the end and let me tell you, it was one of the most overwhelming moments I can remember!  So if you are reading this and you were in the audience last night:  THANK YOU!  Your support means everything to us.

After the show, we had a fantastic opening night party at the beautiful home of Tom and Ivy Mitchell.  Ms. Mitchell is a member of our advisory board and, as I discovered last night, a great hostess!  She laid out an incredible spread of food for us and kept the wine and champagne flowing.  Steven gave a lovely toast for us and we all felt really lucky to be a part of this beginning!

So thank you to the Mitchells, to our board, to our incredibly hardworking company, and to the best audience we could have possibly hoped for…now tell everyone you know to come join the fun and buy a season subscription!

Well, all the stars are colliding – our fantastic Foreigner cast will have its first rehearsal tonight, Of Mice and Men is in great shape, and the lovely ladies of Quilters are currently in their final tech rehearsal before opening tomorrow night!

We got a fantastic write-up in the Daily Press on Sunday – you can read the article here.  We also had a wonderful editorial written about us in today’s paper which you can read here.  We’re very thankful to our friends at the Daily Press for giving us such wonderful attention!

Today I’m at the office for awhile, and then I get to skip on over to the Yoder to see how Quilters is coming along.  Everyone has really been working hard to make this beautiful show as goods it can be – our crew deserves a round of applause for the hours they’ve been putting in! Our designers, carpenters, props runners, stage management, and everyone else who’s been involved in getting this production looking beautiful in the space have been a godsend for TRR.

Well, time to knock a few more things off of my to-do list – the day is flying by!  Hope you and everyone you know have already gotten their season subscription, and I’ll see you tomorrow night at Quilters!

It’s almost here – in eight days, we open our season!  And once we open, we stay open for the rest of our season.

This Sunday, four of the seven lovely ladies from Quilters appeared at our local Patrick Henry Mall to sing some selections from the musical.  It was great fun, and we were able to get some of that beautiful music out into the community.  Many mall patrons stopped at our table and took our information, and we had a couple of very special and dedicated fans sit and chat with the actresses afterward.  Three-year-old Hailey was particularly enamored – she may be both our youngest and biggest fan!

Yesterday, Steven, our wonderful artistic director, and Jordan McArthur, a very talented young actor from the Of Mice and Men cast joined me in the shop as we created dozens of stand-up posters on foam core for distribution.  For the rest of this week, it’ll be my job to brave the nasty heat and get out into the Hampton Roads community to give stores, restaurants, and any place I can find some TRR posters, stand-ups, and cards.

You can expect to see us in the Daily Press this coming Sunday in their Arts & Entertainment section, and you may already be hearing from us – we have advertisements playing on several local talk radio stations.

So tune in, read the paper, patronize your local shops, and stay cool in this heatwave!

Oh yeah – and buy your tickets!

Well hello! Long time no see. As you can imagine, it’s been an insanely busy and wonderful couple of weeks! We’re really starting to get the word on Tidewater Rep out in our region, whether through print ads, going out into the city and distributing posters, or the radio interviews and advertisements our artistic director has been recording. Tickets are starting to sell, but we’re encouraging people now more than ever – buy a ticket! Come opening night! We can’t wait to see those first few faces in the audience on Wednesday, June 18th.

Quilters is really getting going now – they had their design run through last night, which, though I wasn’t able to attend, I have heard went very well. The design run through is basically where all of the designers – lighting, scenic, props, costume, sound, et al – are able to come and watch the show while its still in progress so they can get a clearer notion of the work they still have ahead of them. It’s not a performance, but it does give the actors a unique opportunity to have an ‘audience’ at an early part of their process.

I wasn’t able to go to the Design Run for a very good reason – our very first rehearsal for Of Mice and Men was yesterday evening! Our out-of-town performers for the production arrived Sunday and Monday and I can’t tell you what a thrill it’s been to meet and get to know them. We have actors from all over the country coming together to work on a play that every single one of us loves dearly, and that’s an exhilarating feeling. We read through the play last night, and there are simply no words to describe how happy I am to be assistant directing what is sure to be a phenomenal show. I can’t wait to get back in rehearsal tonight.

Both sets of cast have had a chance to meet and greet – it’s funny how we’ve gone from an entire production of women to a production that’s almost all men. We’re finally balancing out the sexes here at TRR!

Our crew is working harder than ever now, and as our time to move the Quilters set into the Barn approaches, their work will get even more intense. As for our administrative staff…Elizabeth, Laura, Katie and I (and Steven, of course) are actually breathing a little easier these days! Though there’s still lots of hard work to be done, it’s flowing smoother and it’s a whole lot more fun as more and more actors arrive to brighten our days!

I hope everyone has their season subscriptions – and is telling everyone they know to get on board!

As I sat in Schooners, our local bar and grill, last night with our fantastic stage manager, assistant stage manager, and a handful of our great performers, we all looked at each other and expressed the same thought – I can’t believe the first week is over!

The last seven days have been jam-packed with meetings, rehearsals, endless runs to the copy machine, frantic trips across campus to various business offices, and lots of excitement and fun.  The artists in the residence halls instantly formed a great and fun-loving community and camaraderie with each other – whenever I’m there I never want to leave! On Friday night I had the privilege to sit in for an hour or so on the Quilters music rehearsal. I was amazed at how beautifully the seven ladies came together in some pretty complex harmonies after only four rehearsals. It makes me impatient for them to get up on stage and let me see the whole show already! But they’ve still got a few weeks yet to put it all together and turn what’s already beautiful into something perfect.

During last night’s festivities with my fellow TRR ladies (and a gentleman!), we discussed the idea of adding photographs into the blog. I’d love to be able to share some fun rehearsal stills or some shots of Locklyn Brooks’s beautiful creations-in-process in the costume shop or the hard work that Technical Director Steven Ferrier and his crew are doing in the scene shop. So stay tuned – and get your season tickets to TRR now!

Well, that day is finally here! Artists are starting to come into Newport News from out of town and are getting set up at CNU’s lovely Barclay Apartments. The costume and scene shops are filled with hard working techies getting us set up, and my invaluable partner-in-company-management-crime, Elizabeth, is back after a two-week trip to Texas to visit her mother.

The order of the day is similar to the order of the past couple weeks, where I had the privilege to sit at Miss Elizabeth’s desk in the TheaterCNU office (also our administrative base of TRR operations) and try to fill her stylish shoes. We’re getting the business side of things rolling – contracts, payroll, reimbursement, all that thrilling paperwork! I never thought I’d be genuinely excited about something as grown-up as an I-9 Employment Verification Form, but I guess a life in the theatre is full of surprises.

Tomorrow morning, the company will have their first official gathering as a company in the beautiful Yoder Barn, and tomorrow evening, Quilters rehearsal will begin at our own Ferguson. We’ve assembled an incredible team of 7 actresses to tell this story, and director Rebecca Taylor has a truly exciting vision for the play. Everyone’s eager to get rehearsal underway. I know for me that’s what I’ve been waiting for – to have a show in rehearsal! That’s when it really starts to feel like a theatre company to me – once the paperwork shifts from the front burner (though with my position, something tells me paperwork will be my middle name by the end of the summer…and it already feels like my middle initial) and the focus shifts to how we’re making our art happen.

We already have a great partner in helping to create Quilters – the amazing ladies at Nancy’s Calico Patch, right next door in the Hidenwood Shopping Center, are building an absolutely beautiful and big quilt for the show. Nancy and the other dedicated ladies have even provided us with a complete muslin mock-up of the quilt for rehearsal purposes. They’ve become wonderful and invaluable resource in helping us make this show beautiful, and we are so grateful!Well, I’m learning quickly that a company manager’s work is never done…so that’s all for now! See you all at Quilters in a few short weeks…

Hello, and welcome to the Tidewater Rep Blog. I’m Annie, and I probably have the longest job title of anyone else who will be posting on this blog – I am the Assistant to the Artistic Director, Associate Company Manager, and Assistant Director for Of Mice and Men. I love each and every moment of my busy (and poly-syllabic) job, and today, my mission is to share with you–our dear patrons and readers–some information about the playwrights whose great work we’re showcasing this summer at TRR.

We’ve got three plays and four playwrights – Quilters, though strongly engineered by the individual efforts of my fellow multi-tasker Barbara Damashek, was also a collaboration with Emmy-award winner Molly Newman. Our third, John Steinbeck, is closest to my heart and not just because I’m AD’ing his show. I’ll always remember in 10th grade being transfixed by the novel Of Mice and Men and by my fantastic English teacher who taught us the principals of literary analysis. Six weeks later when everyone else in the class was sick to death of analyzing the same story every day, I was still enthralled. Our fourth playwright of this season is Larry Shue, whose life was cut tragically short, but not before he left us with some of the most funny, feel-good plays of his generation.

So, enough of my introductory ramblings, keep reading to meet the playwrights! (in order of performaces).

Molly Newman / Quilters
Molly Newman is an Emmy-award winning writer who, in addition to penning Quilters with Barbara Damashek, has worked extensively in television. Her television work includes Brothers and Sisters, Tracey Takes On (for which she and the writing team won an Emmy), Murphy Brown, and The Larry Sanders Show. Newman and Damashek shared a Tony Award Nomination for their work on Quilters.

Barbara Damashek / Quilters
Barbara Damashek’s work on Quilters earned her a Tony Nomination for writing, but she served as much more than a playwright for the original and Broadway productions. Damashek was also the director, music director, and orchestrated the music. Damashek’s original turn on Broadway was a decade earlier with 1971’s Unlikely Heroes, an evening of three one act plays by renowned author Phillip Roth, featuring Dan Ackroyd. Damashek was the music researcher and editor for the three plays: Defender of the Faith, Epstein, and Eli, the Fanatic.

John Steinbeck / Of Mice & Men
John Steinbeck is a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author and one of Americ’s most beloved literary legends. Steinbeck began his life as a reporter in Salinas, California, and used his experiences during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression to expose and explore the struggles endured by the working class, particularly migrant workers. His novella, Of Mice and Men, was published in 1937, and his first work to focus on California and migrant workers. In 1939, Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, for which he received the Pulitzer. Steinbeck’s writing career thrived throughout his life, and over a dozen of his works were adapted for film, theatre, or both. He even received an Academy Award Nomination for Best Story for Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat in 1944. John Steinbeck died of a heart attack in 1968 at his apartment in Manhattan, but his ashes were scattered in Salinas, California, where many believe was the source of his passion and creativity.

Larry Shue / The Foreigner
Larry Shue published two very popular and oft-performed full-length comedies in his tragically short life. Our artistic director had the good fortune of working with Larry when he was rehearsing The Chicago Premiere of The Foreigner. The Nerd and The Foreigner are known for being light-hearted with incredibly outlandish humor. Shue’s other plays include Grandma Duck is Dead, My Emperor’s New Clothes, and Wenceslas Square. He also worked as an actor, appearing in television’s One Life to Live, The Mystery of Edwin Drewd as well as performing in his own productions of The Nerd and The Foreigner. In 1985, Larry Shue’s life was cut short in a commuter plan crash over the Shenendoah Valley in West Virginia when flying home to see his grandmother. Larry Shue may have left us too soon, but his heart-warming and side-splitting comedies are a wonderful legacy for a multi-talented playwright.