Monday, July 21, 2008

Breaking Out of The Box

Well, a lot has happened since my little tour of The Box. We opened Albuquerque vs. The Flying Saucers which had a terrific run. We actually were dark for a whole month. We got to see other shows and spend some weekend nights with our families. It was nice.

On the 4th of July we opened The Music Man Jr. which had a completely sold out run. We even had a benefit performance for The American Red Cross, to support the Disaster Relief Fund and we were able to raise over $500.00 for them. Music Man featured 20 of Albuquerque's most talented young actors ranging in ages from 6 to 16. We mostly had a lot of new kids in this production, and it was great exposing these new kids to our improv based training. Their costumes were absolutely amazing too! I was extremely pleased with how the whole show turned out, as well as how all of the kids became really great friends on the production. Some of them are inseperable now!


Also, we had another run of The One Night Stanleys. This time their last show had over 70 people in attendence and then as a special surprise the improv group Unitard performed. They hadn't done a show together in over a year, but it was like they had been performing together every day since. It was a fantastic way to end their 4 week run. I'm hoping they will all be performing at the Duke City Improv Festival in September. We are still looking for acts if anyone is interested!
The last bit of amazing exciting news I have is that our landlord (who is awesome and comes to all of our shows) came an saw The Music Man Jr. and was amazed at how many people we had in our building and also the quality of the production. He told Doug, "That's it, we're going to have to renovate." He's already called an architect who has come in and looked at the building and is figuring out what our best options are. It looks like, from what we've talked about, the architect's best idea is that we add a second story to the building. We would have offices, a classroom/rehearsal space and a patio, plus an elevator added to the building plus renovations downstairs to add more seating, and a little snack bar to sell hot dogs and frozen custard. We are also moving forward on getting our 501(c)3 non-profit status so we can apply for grants and quit our job jobs and run the theatre full time. It's all really exciting and kind of feels like a dream. I just hope it all turns out how we're hoping.
That's all for now!
Kristin