Village Theatre’s Blog

We got a great review of Little Women in the Issaquah Press this week. Hopefully this scan is legible enough for you to read all the nice things they said about the production!

This Saturday at 12:30 PM, we are hosting a special preview of Little Women at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park. Victoria Huston-Elem and Dane Stokinger (who play Jo March and Laurie) will be at the bookstore to perform a few musical numbers from the show for your entertainment. We have not done this kind of preview event before — we’re so excited! The event is free of charge and open to the public. Here’s your chance to see the action up close!

The creation of AIDA has been an exciting and new process for Village Theatre. One of the challenges the artistic team has faced is finding a visual connection between the two worlds the show represents: modern day and ancient Egypt.

The design aspect of developing AIDA is a process with many steps, all of which began months before opening night. Director Steve Tomkins teamed up with scenic designer Carey Wong to imagine the world of AIDA. From initial sketches of how this world could be conceived, Carey was able to create a small, very basic mock-up of the stage and set (called a white model). This model evolves over time into the creation of a basic model and finally into a detailed model that is used to convey set design ideas to the Village Theatre production department. The production team is then able to work out the various details such as cost and how this tiny set model can actually be transformed into what audiences will see live on stage. Check out some photos from the beginning stages of AIDA set design below!

On Tuesday night, two nights before opening, the show got a lot of laughs, but I didn’t feel the audience was particularly caught up with the story. Wednesday night, the opposite: not a lot of laughter (at first) but I felt the audience paying attention and really getting involved with the story of the March family.

Last night, opening night, it all seemed to come together. There was plenty of laughter, right from the beginning, but the audience also seemed to be enthralled with the story. There was an audible gasp when Jo revealed her cut hair (she had sold her hair to pay for Marmee’s train ticket). There was a murmur of sympathy when Meg told Aunt March “Love in a cottage is better than no love in a mansion.” (Sympathy, by the way, not just for Meg, who is fighting for the man she loves, but also for Aunt March, who is trying, in her own, obnoxious way, to help Meg.) There was a knowing chuckle when Amy and Laurie begin flirting with each other in Paris, and then a palpable sense of relief when Jo has her breakthrough moment, the moment we refer to as the “writing explosion”, and begins to write the book which will become . And finally, a roar of delight and approval when Jo and Professor Bhaer manage to fumble their way into an engagement.

Why was last night better than the night before? Well, of course, there’s the excitement of opening night. Knowing the long and rocky road this musical has traveled, it was great to see it cross the finish line. But I think it was also that, after over a week of worrying about timing their entrances, getting used to orchestrations, finding their stage positions, maneuvering costumes, etc., the actors were finally able to forget about all the technical problems and focus on each other again. When I looked at the stage, I saw a family, a community. I didn’t see actors in costumes, I saw the March family and their friends. And, as Father says in his letter from the front lines, I couldn’t have been fonder or prouder of our Little Women.

-Sean Hartley

After a week of technical rehearsals, we are back to doing run throughs — and how the show has changed. Last week, it was a bunch of actors and a pianist in a rehearsal room. Now, there’s an orchestra and costumes and sets and lights and sound engineers and stage hands. When you’re writing a show, you don’t have to think technically. You write: “Lights come down on the parlor and up on a street in New York” and than you get on with the dialogue. But the design team and the stage management have to work hours to make that simple little transition smooth. There are palettes (little platforms) to come on and off stage that have to be timed precisely. There are walls that fly up and down, and light cues to time, not to mention underscoring music that has to be written, arranged, copied, and rehearsed before that simple little transition can happen. All this is done, by the way, in the hope is that the audience won’t notice what’s happening, that they will go right from the parlor to the street corner without noticing how it’s done. Just like the writer does in the first place!

-Sean Hartley

Well, Hello. This little blog action is coming to you from the computer of Dane Stokinger. Yeah, I was supposed to have this in a few days ago and I have missed the only deadline of my entire life…. I feel like a reporter, a very bad reporter.

So I had planned on writing this at rehearsal because this week has been the start of “Tech” for Little Women. (I play Laurie in the show.) For those who are unsure of what that is, it is basically a rehearsal that solidifies everything you see on stage. Costumes, lights, sets, wigs, and makeup. This is the time for the crew to get everything fixed that needs fixing for show. Needless to say, I didn’t have the time at rehearsal to write.

One of the challenges of doing a new work is that there are so many things that have never been done “off the drawing board” before so it just takes more time than an established show. That is an amazing aspect of Village Theatre. There are far too few theatres that take a chance on new works. Village makes it possible for writing teams to see their work in either reading form at the festival, or through a staged reading sometime during the year, or sometimes the cream of the crop make it to the Mainstage.

I have had the privilege to work on three new works, including Once Upon a Time in New Jersey, Million Dollar Quartet, and now Little Women.

All have been amazing for their own reasons. ...Jersey gave me a chance to do a really great comedy and play two different characters in a show, which is unusual. Not to mention the fact that we got to do really funny accents. Well, they were funny to me.

Then we had Million Dollar Quartet. Let me just say, for the record, that I, like any male in society, would like to live my life as a Rockstar. Yes, it’s true; I am not embarrassed to admit it. I have practiced my stage dive technique, which, mind you, is amazing, and I have on occasion thought about growing my hair incredibly long and buying stock in Aqua-Net.

So, having said that, this show was a dream. I actually got to play in a band; not only a band, but a really good band. The cast was so talented all the way across the board. The whole process was something that I had never experienced. The way we learned music, painfully hard for a musical theatre guy. The “Nashville Number System:” never heard of it? Well, join the club. It was sink or swim and, for a week or two, I was floating…barely. But with some help from some great musicians and directors, I made it through.

Well, thanks for reading, and maybe I will write more later…or maybe I will be asked nicely never to write again.

-Dane Stokinger

The Issaquah Reporter ran a great story about the Little Women costumes that are being created by the artists in our costume shop, led by designer Cathy Hunt. We can’t link to an online version of the story, so we scanned the article — if you’re interested, here it is:

(The image is about 1MB.)

Today we announced our 2008-2009 Mainstage Season in the Seattle Times: check it out!

There are many factors involved when selecting the shows that will make up any given season at Village Theatre. For starters, Robb Hunt, executive producer, and Steve Tomkins, artistic director, consider what productions truly excite and challenge them artistically. They consider what shows Village Theatre can produce really well with the outstanding resources we have within the organization. Village Theatre then provides our over 18,000 subscribers with a lengthy survey, which includes an array of established musicals, new musicals, and plays from which subscribers may choose. This input is invaluable; it tells us what our community of patrons is most excited to see at our theatre. Once these surveys are collected and tallied, the results are considered – using the majority rules concept – and narrowed down to a short list of roughly ten show possibilities, two shows for each slot, encompassing all three types of productions. From there, production staff researches the many different aspects of each show on the short list. When was the show last seen in the greater Seattle area? Are the rights available? How large is the cast? What is an estimated cost for each show? From there, the short list is narrowed down to an even shorter list and so on, until we have a five show season.

The 2008-2009 Season is not only diverse, it is one-of-a-kind and we cannot wait!

Introducing Victoria Huston-Elem! She will be playing the role Jo March in Little Women. Victoria hails from New York and is thrilled to be making her Village Theatre debut. She was kind enough to share with us some of her experiences with this show and its journey to the Mainstage. Check it out!

Contrary to popular belief, I was not a major player in the growth of Little Women. When Kim and Alison were putting together readings, I was in college. It wasn’t until after the “Broadway” Little Women crashed that I got an opportunity to jump on the bandwagon. In my Senior year, Kim called to tell me that Little Women would be running at a little theatre in Norwich, CT called The Spirit of Broadway. We set up an audition, I drove up with my dad, and the next thing I knew I had a job starting immediately after graduation.

Little Women has grown so much since that production two years ago. The book is completely different, they’ve returned to the earlier versions of several songs, and the characters have been fully fleshed out. It’s crazy working on a new musical — new pages almost every day, changes in music, people constantly keeping you on your toes. It seems that as soon as I memorize one scene, another has been completely rewritten. Its an exercise in patience and short-term memory. Still, I feel honored to be a part of the history of this piece, and I hope that it has a long life after this.

-Victoria Huston-Elem

This is one of our favorite shots from Barefoot in the Park. We love how it catches MJ Sieber ‘in action!’ The photo (and the show) really captures the lowest of the lows in a hilarious way when it comes to “marital bliss.” We can’t believe the show only has two more weekends left!