So, about All About Eve…
We had two semi-rehearsals, and we were making up the sound and lights as we went along, but somehow, it was a smashing success. Sold out, waiting list a mile long. People laughing from start to finish. Which only goes to show: our houses in New Orleans may be full of muck and mold, but we’ll still go to the theatre to watch a man in a dress.
The funny thing, though? For most of last fall, I was kinda bitter about the split-up of the company after the storm. I mean, I understood, people have to go where they have to go, but still… In the end, I assumed that we’d keep doing stuff here and they’d do stuff wherever they were and, we’d see each other for Carnival and Decadence.
Problem is, we work as an ensemble. Whatever success we’ve had as a theatre company is due to the fact that the core members of the company “get it”. We know one another well, we get along, we think alike, our sensibilities match. You can’t hold auditions for that; either the chemistry’s there, or it’s not. Sure, there are plenty of actors who have great timing and all, but so far, we haven’t found any that really fit the bill.
So, as much as I’d love to have a theatre company that was truly indigenous, truly “New Orleans”, I think that’d require some forcing–square peg, round hole kinda stuff. We work well as a group, and I guess we’ll continue to work as a group–only difference is, now there are some of us here and some of us in Atlanta. It’s a brave, new, scary, unfamiliar, and at times, very frustrating world, but there’s no point in looking back now.
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