Glad my first post was so well received - this brings me great joy folks!
Did I mention that my musical theatre company BSMTC is an award winning company? No? Ok well I am telling you now - we won a NODA award for best musical in District 7 South East, two weeks ago for our production of Carousel last November!! To the uninitiated who don't know what a NODA award is - its like the Oscars for amateur theatre. Yes it really is. The National Operatic and Dramatic Association NODA provides support and advice to amateur theatre groups. Every year we invite our NODA regional rep to come along and review our performances, and we all wait with bated breath to see what they write as their opinion really matters to us.
I was especially proud that we were nominated for this award as I took on the role of Production Manager for Carousel - well actually, I was co-erced into it by our President who plied me with coffee, beer etc until I gave in. He is very good at getting people to do things they never set out to do! It was a very busy role and I had to learn a lot but I am glad I did it and I had a great team to help me. Although there were moments when I thought 'what the hell have I taken on'?
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| This is the award -shame its not a trophy! |
Which brings me to the reason why I think we won this award - teamwork. We are of course a fantastic company with a supreme amount of talent - that's a given. (I am not at all biased!) However, to make an amateur production work it involves a lot more than just the cast - you need a great stage crew, a wardrobe manager, a props manager, someone to handle publicity and marketing, front of house staff, raffle ticket sellers. I could go on....When I took on the production manager role I did not foresee the amount of work that we would need to do - and it is all done voluntarily by dedicated people most of whom have full time day jobs. It does always seem to be the really busy people who get these jobs doesn't it?
I was very lucky with this show in getting a really great team together - firstly this show had a big costume quota and a big cast including 2 sets of children ( 12 in all) . Our wardrobe manager Cat took this job on and was fantastic - she was so organised and patient - and she kept her cool at all times. Costume is a tricky area - everyone wants to look their best on stage and so when you hire costumes as we do they can be badly fitting and in need of some work. In fact the area of costume is a whole other blog post - I will definitely write something on that.
To give you some idea of how many costumes there were including a bear - a BEAR people - this is the opening number with the whole cast on the stage..
and here are a few more images to show you including the boys as sailors...
I had a brilliant props team - my lovely mum Diane and a lovely lady called Jenny. Now my mum never does a job by halves -she has to do a job well or not at all - which is why I asked her to do it! She still has not forgiven me! Anyway as you may or may not know Carousel features a lot of clams - a huge amount of clams - as we all go on a clambake and even sing about it. So where were we going to get that many clams? Answer - my mum made them from Fimo and painted them...definitely worthy of a NODA award all by themselves I think you will agree?
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| You would never know these were not real clams would you? |
Our other amazing team members were our stage crew and I was lucky to find a set of people with experience who were willing to get stuck in. We handled all the publicity ourselves and the programme and flyer was designed by the son of one of our members.
Of course you cannot win a NODA award without a great director and MD - and we have both. Boy, do they work us hard sometimes but it is sooo worth it. We started our run feeling confident and we all knew what we were doing, plus the singing and music was fantastic. Some members of the audience said 'You'll Never Walk Alone', sung in the last scene gave them goosebumps and made them cry.
So to finish this post I thought I'd share with you the picture of us all at the NODA awards - we did a NODA selfie! This was after we won and we were on a massive high...tonight is our AGM and we are going to show the award to our members so we are feeling very proud of ourselves.
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| The theatre luvvies celebrate their win |
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