Saturday, March 22, 2008

Blind Dates and One Night Stans

We just started a four week run of our fabulous improv team, "The One Night Stanleys." These are 4 of the most talented improvisors I've ever seen. Joe, Steve, Alex and Nando are funny and talented and quick on their feet. They do their version of an Armando, which is where they pick some one from the audience and interview them about their day and take their suggestions from that. Tonight centered around a girls 21st birthday and her annoying loud family members, which always good for an improv show.

Usually the comedy team, Blackout, (who are fabulous!) opens for The Stanleys but tonight was a special treat for our audience. Mark Chavez of the Pajama Men and Kevin Elder of Tricklock Theatre opened for them. We had no idea what they were going to do, but when they pulled two girls out of the audience, I knew something crazy was about to happen. They took these two girls on an improvised Blind Date. They took a walk on the beach, had dinner, nice conversation and all the time, these poor girls had no idea what was going on, but went along for the ride.

What a great night. We had a fantastic audience and a great show. Sadly, this show will never be performed again, but they are performing for the next 3 weekends and you should come check them out!

Until next time!

Monday, March 17, 2008

Allow me to introduce myself...

Hi! My name is Kristin, I live in Albuquerque, and I own The Box Performance Space with my business partner and friend Doug. We just had our one year anniversary. We specialize in children's theatre (for us meaning theatre by kids for kids) and comedic improv, both long form and short form. And just to make it even more confusing, lets throw the occaisional adult scripted show in there as well. I am a director, producer, and an actor.

We just closed "Laughing Wild" by Christopher Durang and it did very well by me, creatively. Financially on the other hand, it made budget, which is nice. I had two really talented actors in this show, Heather and Blake. They worked really hard and deserved bigger audiences. That is a goal of ours to figure out why and how to not have that happen for future shows.

We just had auditions for an original piece (and it's also a karaoke musical) called "Albuquerque vs. The Flying Saucers," written by a local author based on his grandfather's script for "Earth vs. The Flying Saucers." This was by far one of the largest auditions for an original piece I had ever seen. 33 extremely talented children walked through our door. It was so hard to cast this show. Tonight is the first read through and I'm excited to see all the kids working together. We have a lot of our regulars back again, but some new faces and it's always fun to see the kids make new friends.

When I got involved in theatre in high school, I realized at some point that this was my calling and I wanted to own my own theatre someday. I never thought it would be a children's theatre, but I am very happy that it is. Bringing the joy of theatre to youth is really rewarding and reminds me every day why I love what I do.

Hopefully, the purpose of this blog is to give updates on shows and serve as kind of a history of the space that I can look back at on our 20th anniversary and say, "Wow, we've done so much."

Happy reading! and All the love.
Kristin