From the Director's Desk:

Oh my! It has been WAY too long since I have posted anything. The Other Wise Man, overall, went well. (Pictures are forthcoming.) We hit a few snags the couple days before the performances. I'll mention two of them. (The others are typical "live theatre" things that go wrong.)

The first: One of the sopranos, singing the roles of Rhodaspes and Shibyah, had to leave for an out-of-town emergency on Friday afternoon. (That's Friday December 4th. The performances were the following Monday and Tuesday.) Thankfully, after several phone calls and emails, we ended up having the soprano who played those roles in the original cast (from 2006) fill them for this production. She cheated a little and put her music into a little book which she fixed up to look like it belonged there. (I've done the same thing. When I was singing the role of Bill in A Hand of Bridge, I put my music on the cards. Of course, so did the other singers.)

The other mishap...Well, I had the piano tuned on Wednesday and everything was fine with it during our music rehearsal on Friday night. Saturday afternoon during the first dress rehearsal, the pedals fell off. Well, we stuck a piece of wood under them (that was after trying to duct tape them back up, screw the pedal thing onto the piano...neither of them worked) and finished the run. For the second run we pulled out the other piano. An upright. Slightly out of tune. And, as was discovered a little later, had mouse droppings all over it. Thank you Purell.

We tried again with the grand (the one that was just tuned) by stucking another piece of wood and some other stuff under the wood and it worked fine. The pianist threatened the lives of everyone if they even touched the piano. I mean, why mess with something if it's working? We're not the government!

Ticket sales from this production were much less then we had hoped for. We had a lot of things we were competing with. Messiah concerts...EVERY performing arts organization in the area does a Christmas (er, Holiday) show and it snowed BOTH NIGHTS!!! I think next year we'll do a single concert. We'll try for Christmas (day) afternoon. A free concert. We'll see how it goes.

Currently we are getting ready for our next production. A concert titled, A little bit of this, a little bit of that. This concert will be accompanied by Larry Gee. And will feature many singers from all over the valley. My assistant and UNIPAC's General Production Director, Danica Yates, is producing this concert so that I can spend some time working on other things. (Like next season. I've got finish an English adaption of Bastien und Bastienne and get the orchestrations for it. And work on The Impresarrio. And my own personal pursuits as a playwright.)

I'll make sure Danica writes a little something about the concert.

Also keep in mind, we'll be holding auditions for soloists for our Easter Concert (The Garden by Michael McLean and Bryce Neubart) towards the latter end of February. The chorus will be open to anyone...keeping in mind we'll have just five rehearsals to learn the music. Chorus will be able to use music during the concert. Soloists will need to be memorized and will NOT be using microphones.

Thank you and God bless.