We’ve been doing a lot of lifts in rehearsal lately. See? That’s me up in the air. Ahh! But it’s fun. 🙂 Most of us are rather new to lifts, but there’s something thrilling about them, though they can be tricky. Both lifter and liftee have to work together, getting the right grip, balance, position, […]
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Beauty and the Beast: Story Building Blocks
As promised, here are the ways I’ve been coming to understand some of the basic building blocks of story–with a certain Tale as Old as Time as example. 🙂 1. The Inciting Incident I first heard of this concept in a screenwriting class in college. This event is what gets the story going. […]
Jazz Antigua
The dancers leapt, reached, and whirled on stage to the rhythm of percussion and a live reading of Langston Hughes’s poem “Drums.” Moving and acting in harmony with each other, they brought to life their heritage—the dances of Africa, the billowing sails of the slave ships, the music and color of New Orleans, the heart-tugging […]
Busyness, Next Steps, and One Thing
We put on a show the other day.During both performances, I stood in my little corner at the back of the theater, near the door to handle tickets for any late-comers and close to the table of “Singing Valentines” I supervised at intermission, and watched in delight as our young performers–ages 9 to 25–danced, sang, […]
Flash Mob
I’d never been part of a flash mob before—or seen one except on YouTube—until this weekend. Saturday evening, the senior division of our little theater company gathered outside a movie theater at an outdoor mall. The night air nipped cold for southern California, so we bundled in hats and scarves. Trying to act as if […]
Of Les Mis, Narnia, and Fishermen
I rarely go to see movies in the theater—and almost never see the same movie twice on the big screen. But I did with Les Misérables. Many of my friends have loved this musical for years, whereas it’s only been this fall that it’s captured my heart–a combination of plugging through the book, seeing our […]
The Prince is Giving a Ball…
Come one, come all!Cinderella opened last night to an almost sold-out crowd–and there are three more performances! (My sister, shown in dress rehearsal at top left, will be Cinderella in the matinee. 🙂 ) Check out more pictures from dress rehearsals here and here. And if you’re in the southern California area, email showlights.theater@gmail.com for details […]
To Put on a Play…
My family’s life right now is a whirl of rehearsals, emails, and phone calls, of altering costumes and gathering props, of organizing tickets and writing programs, of juggling—as are our directors and all the families involved in our upcoming production of Cinderella—all the myriad details that come with putting on a musical. We open in […]
Swept Away
I talk a lot about story on this blog—the power of storiesand how they change us, how God can use them to shape our lives. But sometimes, stories can just carry you away—to another place, another time, even another world, a mini-vacation in themselves. And this too, I think, can be God’s gift. The Colonel’s […]
Godspell
My family went to a production of the musical Godspell last night. One of the directors of our little theater company was in it, and none of us except my dad had ever seen it performed on stage—only the movie version, purported to be far inferior. We’d often wondered if it were a show we’d […]