Opening Halloween Night

Well, I've just returned from school where we had the first performance of this year's school production - The Wizard of Ozylvania. We had a 10am matinee for the local primary school kids. They seemed to enjoy it quite a lot so that is good. I feel far less nervous about tonight's show now. Only 2 slight technical hitches as well. Also comforting.

It's the second school production I've co-directed but the first I've co-written. (Matt and I wrote the play with a teacher from my school). Despite it being a reasonably short (about 1 1/4 hours plus intermission), 'fun' play rather than gripping serious drama, several aspects have been nerve-wrackingly stressful.

Firstly, we've gone with a minimalist set where all the backdrops are digital and projected onto the screen at the back of the stage. This automatically creates a degree of stress as it requires a laptop and a projector to function for the show. Anyone who has ever used a laptop and/or projector in a school will know that they are unfathomably unreliable beasties and love to break down at the worst possible moment*.

Secondly, there was the matter of the dance numbers in the show. I have, it is fairly safe to say, virtually no skills in choreography. Working out how to position dancers and use the stage once the dance is set is fine, but a dance number made up by myself is too ghastly a thing to comtemplate. So the basic choreography was assigned to students and we adults merely gave them a brief of what style and story things needed to happen, and then integrate the dances into the show.

Unfortunately, without wanting to disparage the good name of dancers everywhere as I am sure there are many dedicated and grounded dancers in the world, there were some flakiness issues. About half of the dance group pulled out of the show about a week before we were opening.

Not good. Apparently, some of them got confused about dates and didn't realise that they were in another show on the same week!

However, those dancers that remained on the show have been fantastic and have filled in the numerous gaps left by the ones who flaked off. Some of their costume/make-up changes are pretty tight as they now all have to do everything but it can't be helped really.

Anyway, it should all turn out to be fine. Fingers crossed and break a leg and all that other theatre superstition stuff.

So if you happen to find yourself in or around Kapiti at about 7pm over the next few days, pop in and see the show. So far it has earned such extravagant (or should I say dubious) praise as the following:

"It's funnier than Footloose." - Kid in the show
"You can tell teachers wrote it." - Another kid in the show
"My mum liked the script." - Yet another kid in the show
"You can tell they really enjoyed it... nobody asked to go to the toilet during the show." - Primary school teacher who accompanied the 150 youngsters

*Actually this is true for a lot of technology once it is in a school environment. I remember as a student how teachers always seemed incapable of setting up a TV to play a video to the class - somehow it always took a lot of fidgeting, sending someone off for a missing remote or something, and general chaos while the class became bored and restless. I used to think my teachers were just incredibly inept at using the TV, however, I have since discovered that a combination of rough treatment and messy storage of TV/projectors means that they are often in a dodgy condition just waiting to revenge themselves on an unsuspecting teacher for their shabby treatment by completely failing to work.