This year Paul is singing Messiah with me and it has been really fun attending rehearsals together! Our concert is this weekend and is free and open to the public. If you want to come, you can obtain tickets from the Heritage Center Theatre Box Office all this week!
For more information about Cedar Citys Messiah tradition Click HERE.
We closed the show a week ago and I have had a few days to decompress.
I feel really good about the work we did and happy to have been involved in this project as a performer and Stage Manager.
Here are a few photos of my characters in the ensemble:
Crazy Cat Lady of Skid Row:
Mrs. Luce (Claire Boothe Luce is a personal hero of mine, so it was fun to play the Little Shop version of her persona!)
SUU News did a nice write up in the campus paper HERE.
The Father of the actor who played Seymour took a ton of photos during our closing night performance. Â His photo stream is located HERE.
And Dean, who played Mushnik took photos the same night that Paul showed up for his shoot. Â His photos stream is HERE.
Dean took a picture of Paul while he shot the cast:
For the finale the ensemble was Zombified, so here I am in my zombie makeup after opening night:
I did about ten blog entries of the show using video and still pictures that I took myself during rehearsals. I should have asked permission to share this content because some of the cast did not want to be associated with my Blog because of my views on various issues. So I deleted all of that material and have only included a few shots that are mostly just me, with a few cast members in the background.
Here are some final thoughts about this show….
I have watched Little Shop of Horrors live several times, mostly after being produced by high schools and amateur groups. I have watched the movie several times and in preparing to be the Stage Manager for this production I watched and listened to various You Tube clips literally dozens of times. As the show embedded itself into my brain over the past few months I have come to believe it is a redemption show, much more than just a creepy musical.
The desires of Audrey and Seymour to be parents and live a normal domestic life, the Faustian themes of selling our life blood to evil entities who end up eating us in the end, the willingness of Seymour to forgive Audrey for her past, and the chills that ran up and down my spine every time I heard Suddenly Seymour sung by our leads…this is a wonderful show with amazing music and I was so happy to be a part of it.
I am grateful for my families support while I was away rehearsing every night these past few weeks and for the wonderful help from Paul and Shelly who took over the kitchen while I have a few months of doing what I love most. It was a great experience….
Now back to my kitchen…
This concert was so good, I am not sure I could do it justice to try to describe it. So grateful to see Paul and Andy singing Mozarts Requiem up on the stage together with that exquisite orchestra…now on to Messiah rehearsals!
Jenny Hatch
It is Labor Day.
I always think of the week of Andrews Birth seventeen years ago as well as my beautiful Blessing Way that we celebrated on Labor Day in 2002 a few weeks before Ben was born, when the first monday in september rolls around.
Whenever I hear the word Labor, I always connect it to birth, babies, and family life.
When I was at BYU I trained for musical theatre at a semi professional level and really wanted to achieve some status as a professional performer.
Meeting my husband changed things and instead of “Laboring” to create Music I have engaged in the labor of Mothering our five children for these past 25 years.
For many years I ached to be back in rehearsal halls mastering difficult music and choreography while developing my onstage characters.
Despite significant amounts of loving parental encouragement, none of my children has any ambition for musical theatre. They have sung in choirs and have enjoyed working backstage when I directed a show, but except for the random Mormon Ward Roadshow, or a bit part in a play, none of them has the inclination or desire to step out and try for a lead in a show.
While I would love to share my passion for performing more intently with our children, a side of me is very grateful that they have chosen other pursuits and areas of focus to spend their time and energy on. It is a small side of me that trembles when considering my children becoming performers, because I believe we need musicians who are bulletproof when potentially being seduced into the dark side of the Performing Arts.
I know it is possible to be an entertainer while holding fast to morality. My friend Kara Lyn Roundy has done it. But I would not want one of my children sucked into that vortex of darkness before they were mature enough to handle it.
My heart aches for Miley. I saw her image splashed all over the web last week and I wanted to grab a large bathrobe, wrap her in it, and give her a big motherly hug.
That slime who was onstage with her should be arrested for Sexual Assault, Harassment, and Placed in a Stockade while child actors throw rotten vegetables at him for exploiting her.
If Billy Ray would man up and go punch Mr. Thicke in the nose, that would be the healthiest message society could receive at this point, especially the tweens who are currently taking it all in on the web.
If husbands, wives, fathers, and mothers just shrug and say, “Well that is what it takes to make it in the music business when you are in a new media environment”, we are doomed as a society.
I have often thought as we rounded the corner into main stream discussion around lewd sex acts in 1998 that if Monica Lewinskys father had gathered together a posse of friends and headed over to the White House for a lynching of Bill Clinton when it became public that he was molesting interns in the White House, we may have headed this wholesale societal jump into the babylonian pit off at the pass.
Even if the vigilantism of a Mr. Cyrus or Mr. Lewinsky resulted in an imprisonment or a violent clash with authorities, the symbolism of Father as Protector of innocent and vulnerable young women would still have been worth the effort…
And it would have been important to a young Miley or Monica to know that the person most responsible for keeping her safe from predators was on task and engaged.
As awful as the spectacle of a Dad giving in to his passions in order to pull his daughter or son out of a dangerous situation may seem, to me, the shrug of “Whatever” as he just ignores the situation is worse.
My dearest friend, Kara Lyn is visiting and she and Ben sang together last night…
