Well, I'm recovering today from a great opening night and a really fun opening night celebration for Wayside Theatre's world premiere of Shadow of the Raven: Stories of Edgar Allan Poe.
The audiences this weekend were very enthusiastic about the play and opening night even yielded a standing ovation, which made all of us feel great about the hard work we had put into making Steve Przybylski's script come alive on stage.
It has been a wonderful and remarkable journey to get it to opening; full of hard work, lots of stress, technical nightmares, and enough wackiness to make even Edgar himself cast a leery eye or two. But it is open and now we head into the run.
What I loved about the response last night and this weekend, was just how full bodied it was. I'm sure the play isn't for everyone. But for those who are willing to take the ride, it seems like the really enjoy the journey and the spooky fun.
I am really thrilled with everyone's work on this show. A true collaboration that yielded some really wonderful results.
More pictures available on this Flickr feed
It has been quite a week as we've been preparing the world premiere of Steve Przybylski's Shadow of the Raven: Stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Lots of technical issues, some rewrites and cuts in the text, and just a lot of hard good work.
Today we have our first two audiences for a matinee and evening performance. The show needs to get in front of real people now to find out if it is going to work or not. That's a scary thing, but a good thing. I'm looking forward to seeing if we've done this well. Audiences don't lie.
Here's hoping.
Wayside Theatre and its audiences are blessed with some wonderfully talented, and often multi-talented actors and actresses who ply their trade on our stages. Larry Dahlke is one of those multi-talented marvels. As an actor he is a gifted chameleon, and as a musician he can make music out of just about anything. In our World Premiere production of Steve Przybylski's Shadow of the Raven: Stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Larry gets to show off many of this talents, including making music with a theremin. If you don't know much about a theremin, you are not alone. But to give you an introduction to this unique instrument and a bit of its history, Larry offers this quick little video.
Also posted on InsideWayside, our company blog.
Working on a play about the supernatural, Edgar Allan Poe, a ghost or two, and some pretty deep psychological mysteries is always fun and a lot of work. Working on any play, sometimes things happen in the work that tie directly into the play. Yesterday, a spooky (yet fun) event happened in rehearsal.
Shadow of the Raven: Stories of Edgar Allan Poe is set in a library, created to honor Edgar Allan Poe. It is full of his books, and other Poe-like items. We had our first rehearsal on stage yesterday and while the structure and most of the set was there, a lot of the props and dressing are still to come. The large book on the lectern that will be a collection of the complete works of Poe will be coming in this week, so we use rehearsal or stand in props until they arrive. Yesterday we grabbed an old book of roughly the same size, that was actually an old actors directory containing headshots and brief info on the actors.This book stood in for the complete works that the characters refer to often in the story. It sits in a place of reverence on a lectern.
When one of the characters crossed to the lectern and flipped the book open while talking about Vincent Price, the book opened to, yep, you guessed it, a picture of Vincent Price.
Gave us all a few chills and a good laugh.Spooky.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The collaborative process is what I'm talking about. On this show the collaboration is working really well. Spookily so, which is appropriate given the supernatural nature of the show we are working on. Big weekend ahead as we take the stage for rehearsals for the first time. The goal is to get the show on the stage in prep for the technical and special effects we add next week.
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