When: November 6th 12p-2p
Where: SMCT

Come hang out with characters from the upcoming show The Red Velvet Cake War!

We’re having a fundraiser BBQ featuring tri-tip, bratwurst, burgers, and vegan options.

Scan the QR code or click the red BBQ Menu button below to see the menu and how to pre-order!

For members it is just $10!

You can pre-order your meal via venmo!

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to the emil below: 
thervcw@gmail.com

We’ll see y’all there!

The post Red Velvet Cake War BBQ Fundraiser appeared first on Santa Maria Civic Theatre.

The post Season 64 Trailer appeared first on Santa Maria Civic Theatre.

Auditions for Full Monty are coming up September 25th through September 27th! I had the opportunity to interview director Lynda Mondragon about the upcoming Santa Maria Civic Theater Show – The Full Monty: The Musical.

Why Full Monty?

I liked the movie when I watched it and after I heard there was a musical version I rushed to get it. I fell in love with the score. I think the music in this production takes the story to a whole other level. The play has a lot of heart and it lets us watch these guys grow over a two-hour production.

All of the characters are facing personal issues such as parenthood, divorce, self-esteem, body image, sexuality, or taking care of a parent. These are all real issues that we face as a society and it gave a lot of “realness” to the script. It feels like the story and the characters are based in reality. A script like this allows you to explore and face these challenges but the show isn’t a downer. It’s hopeful and light-hearted and makes you like the characters and root for them.

There’s so much out there that deals with women in body images and insecurities that it’s a fun role reversal to see it from a man’s perspective. I think sometimes we forget that we’re all universally the same although our experiences of these feelings are different.

Full Monty Remount

Full Monty was originally scheduled in May of 2020 as the closing show of our 61st season. We had just completed auditions and started early rehearsals when the pandemic first started back in March 2020. Due to state guidelines, SMCT made the difficult decision to cancel Red Velvet Cake War which was set to premiere that same weekend. There was a lot of uncertainty but I went to the board and we decided to cancel Full Monty as the pandemic continued

An on-stage live production was not an option in 2020. In June 2021 the board made the decision to create a truncated 2021-2022 season for the theatre’s 63rd season.

How do you get ready for a show like this?

For me, the process starts a year to six months before I even have auditions. One of my hobbies is listening to musicals and reading scripts so when I choose a script to direct I already have a vision for the production. I’ve already worked it in my head. It turns into an obsession. I start to hear the songs in my sleep and imagine casting people I meet or see in the grocery store. I’m always on the lookout at thrift stores and other places for sets and costumes.

Once I familiarize myself with the show I start building the set in my head based on what I know is already available at the theatre. First I make exhaustive lists on Amazon of items I know we’ll need to buy. Then, I start thinking about schemes I’d like actors to read for callbacks. I work with the theatre to try and advertise as well as reach out to friends, family, acquaintances for auditions.

With a big show like this we also try to secure a great team to work with me. A show like this needs technical support, stage managers, a musical director, and a stage crew. This team helps move and store set pieces, create and organize props, and can help with quick changes, especially for the guys. We need folks to help with tech such as lighting and sound cues. We may need people to run special effects that can’t be controlled from the lighting booth. Ideally, I’d have a choreographer and an intimacy coordinator.

What is an intimacy coordinator?

An intimacy coordinator is someone who ensures the well-being of actors that participate in intimate scenes. it’s not something that the SMCT has done but I know that directors including myself are hyper-aware and sensitive to those needs especially when you’re in a small intimate space like ours.

You have to be aware and sensitive to cast members as people as well as artists with their unique experiences that they bring and what their boundaries are. You don’t want to pressure people to do something they aren’t comfortable with.

With that said, there are 6-7 roles in this play where men have to show their bodies. Ultimately that’s some of the suspense of the show, the “will they or won’t they”. Part of the challenge of this particular play is finding solutions based on my cast’s comfort level.

So should potential cast members be comfortable with nudity?

When approaching people about Full Monty auditions everyone always assumes that each part requires nudity. It’s not true! There are more “non-naked” characters than not. This show is so much more than that last five seconds. The nudity takes a back seat to everything else you’re experiencing at that point.

Like every good play, you get invested in the relationships between the characters and you are rooting for them to succeed. It’s not sleazy or done just for laughs, the story is charming and beautiful like a flower growing through cracks in concrete.

Full Monty is a unique raunchy experience but it’s also very heartfelt and loving. It’s about supporting your friends. I feel very connected to that message because it’s similar to how I have to get people to audition for the show. People are scared and I’m asking them to trust me to take them on the ride and trust that I’ll look out for them. We will have a lot of fun just like the characters in the play.

Who else should audition for Full Monty?

Although the focus of the play is on the core six guys, the ensemble is crucial to this production. Many of the supporting cast members have songs of their own and are tied into the main plot lines.

One of my favorite groups of this show is the women. They bring a lot of balance to the show and this show allows them to turn the tables on traditional gender roles and behaviors. The women are fully realized characters of their own, not just 2d props. You actually get to hear their unique points of view.

The opening number “It’s a woman’s world” is a fun turnaround because these women are the breadwinners in the town because of the mill closure. This song is about them letting loose and bonding together at the bathroom in the club.

Does everyone sing?

If you’re worried about singing during Full Monty auditions you should know that there are also non-singing roles both in the ensemble and in minor characters. I’ll probably cast a smaller ensemble so they will be playing multiple roles with multiple characters and costume changes.

If you’re interested in auditioning for one of the core guys but maybe you are insecure about dancing, know that this is more of a movement-based show. It’s based on characters not on fast feet. None of the characters are suddenly Baryshnikov. It’s a show that focuses on heart and story, not the dancing

How are you planning to stage Full Monty at SMCT?

One of my favorite things to do as a director with SMCT is put on a production that you can’t imagine happening in such a small space. For example, in Seussical, we had a cast of over thirty and incorporated multiple words and different societies all within our little black box theatre.

Even with smaller or non-musical productions I’ve added elements to surprise the audience. In Kimberly Akimbo we were able to bring on a reassembled car for scenes and I’m hoping to do something similar for Full Monty.

I like to challenge myself and see how you can do more with less. One of my favorite things to do is create magic in a black box space. I’m still looking for the right pieces but I think audiences will be surprised.

What challenges do you see?

Because this is a remount I was fortunate enough to have already started all of my pre-production processes in early 2020. A lot of things usually challenge a director early on such as securing a musical director, making rehearsal tracks, and preparing audition pieces for callbacks. Normally I’d be stressing about those things before our Full Monty auditions but they’re already completed.

However, due to the pandemic, I’m facing unpredictability in the process. I’m worried that actors are less likely to audition. There are challenges of keeping actors and crew safe, and working within state and local guidelines. I’m planning to get creative with rehearsal space and schedules and making sure everyone stays healthy and safe.

How will you keep actors safe during auditions?

For auditions we’ll have folks mask up while waiting and when congregated in the main area. We’ll be doing smaller distance musical auditions to keep within local guidelines. This is a hurdle we’ve never had to deal with before, doing a musical like this during the pandemic. Once things are cast we will be doing some rehearsals virtual and some of them possibly outside especially at the beginning. As we move into rehearsals we’ll do the best we can and adjust schedules and spaces as needed to keep everyone safe.

Everyone wants to know, will we be seeing “The Full Monty”?

Well we’ve got to keep SOME secrets about the production but I can say that my plans for the final number will leave everyone…satisfied.

Want to be a part of the show?

Santa Maria Civic Theatre is 100% volunteer run. We need actors and stage crew to make this musical a success! Visit The Full Monty: The Musical audition page to learn more about Full Monty auditions. If you’d like to get involved and volunteer with this show or with any show, get in touch with us!

The post Are You Daring Enough to Audition for Full Monty? appeared first on Santa Maria Civic Theatre.

12 Angry Men: A History

The show was originally written as a television play in 1954. In those days, it was common to have live broadcasts like this in addition to serials and other types of shows. It was very well received and won 3 Emmy Awards (writer, director, best actor). This led them to create a stage show version and later the film which was produced by Henry Fonda. The film version is effectively a longer version of the play, but I think there are some very notable differences.

The Use of Anonymity

One of the most important is that the defendant is never shown and never physically described. Characters mention that “the kid” is from the slums, that he’s nineteen, and that he has a troubled past. Most notably, the ethnicity of the defendant is never revealed which leaves the audience free to imagine what he might look like. In this way, it helps to realize our own prejudices.

In the film, the characters reveal their names but in the play we never learn a single name. I think this helps to keep the characters more of an archetype. It helps to allow the audience to see these people not as individuals but with qualities they might have or their friends might have.

Angry Men

You see, none of the characters in this play are evil. There aren’t any bad guys and good guys. Everyone is making choices based on their own life experiences. Each juror has some kind of personal issue that blocks them from seeing the truth. Characters react because they have pre-conceived notions of morality, the justice system, or because they are too concerned with their own emotions or discomfort.

In this short play, we are introduced to characters that could easily be us in the same situation. Would you be the impatient Juror #7 who just wants to go home? Would you be someone haunted by their past like Juror #5? Just like the characters in 12 Angry Men, we all bring our own prejudices, emotions, and experiences and it colors our decisions.

The Angriest Man: Juror #8

I first saw the movie version of 12 Angry Men in high school around the same time that I first read To Kill A Mockingbird. I think the two have a lot in common. Both feature a stern but fair father figure who fights for their convictions against tremendous peer pressure. I’ve always seen Atticus Finch as a role model both as a way to live your life and as a parent. The main protagonist of 12 Angry Men, Juror #8, shares a lot of these qualities. Fairness, passion, courage, all delivered in a calming non-judgmental way.

I admire the conviction and courage of Juror #8, but his real strength is his patience. He guides the others gently without letting his frustration get in the way. He leads them to see the weakness of their character and helps them to strive to be better, to embrace compassion and mercy over spite and anger.

Reader’s Theater

One of the reason I jumped on 12 Angry Men is because it is a fantastic play for reader’s theater. At Santa Maria Civic Theatre, we present plays without a full set or costumes, without complicated blocking or special effects. Don’t get me wrong, sets and costumes are a great way to reinforce themes and help the audience get lost in the play, but what’s cool about reader’s theater is that we can focus on the dialog. The dialog in this play is quick and raw, it’s full of emotion and human feeling and even after only two rehearsals my amazing cast is already killing it.

November 8th – 10th

12 Angry Men tickets are on sale now at 805 Tix. We’ve got an incredible cast of both men and women and I guarantee you’ll leave wowed by the fantastic talent you’ll see on stage.

The post Coming Soon: 12 Angry Men appeared first on Santa Maria Civic Theatre.

I’ve been many things on stage at the Santa Maria Civic Theatre. I’ve played a con man trying to swindle a blind woman. A few years ago I was a jealous husband trying to hire a hit man to murder his wife. Then I played a racist reverend, a physicist with a stutter, and finally a police inspector missing an arm and a leg last year in Young Frankenstein. This time I play a tax exile who can’t quite keep track of his sardines in Noises Off: The hardest show ever.

Noises Off is about a play called Nothing On and the actors that perform it. Most of us play two roles, the actor and the part that actor is playing. That means we need different postures, different voices, and in some cases different accents depending on the line. Believe it or not, that’s not the hard part, that’s actually the fun part. The hard part is that we’ve got to do all of that while running and back forth with a plate of sardines.

You see, in a normal run-of-the-mill play the actors learn their lines and they move around a little bit on stage while saying them. Maybe you lean on a table or sit gingerly on the edge of an old couch, but mostly you try not to stand in a line and you remember to turn your torso to the audience so the audience can see you better. Noises Off is not a normal play. In a normal play, if something breaks on stage or someone falls down or forgets a line, it’s a huge event. For Noises Off…well that’s the plot. In this show, nearly everything that can go wrong in a play DOES go wrong. There are stuck doors, lost contacts, wardrobe malfunctions, missing actors, forgotten lines, slippery stairs, and a bit with a cactus.

Art Imitates Life

Hilariously, in the true fashion of art imitating life, this is also true for the real backstage. Now, I don’t want to give away any of the actual laughs so instead I’m going to tell you some things that happened on stage this last weekend which were definitely not supposed to happen, but in the context of this ridiculous play were seemed totally plausible.

First, we broke a plate on stage. I don’t mean it chipped, I mean it smashed on the ground in about six hundred pieces. Not a huge deal but it was also full of sardines, which flew everywhere. Instead of a collective gasp from the audience, they just laughed harder. Someone asked me after the show what our plate budget was. The director replaced these plates with plastic fish plates. One of those plates was immediately stepped and badly chipped on in the following performance. Another was knocked clean out of my hand by an axe and skidded into the audience. Don’t worry, the axe IS part of the show.

Later we broke a cardboard box on stage. No, wait, we broke TWO boxes on stage. One was flattened because Gary sat on it, the other ripped up the side. I had to repair them both with white duct tape between two shows. Speaking of those boxes, someone (*cough*…me) thought it would be a good idea to fill the grocery box with actual groceries, including a bag of flour left over from Kimberly Akimbo. The bag burst open during a performance and drenched several actors in flour. It caused our stage manager to have to mop the backstage area during the show. Not between acts, I mean while we were rushing back and forth between doors he had a mop and a bucket and was cleaning the floor under our feet.

Again, these are not actually part of the show but are such good examples of the kind of things you will see in Noises Off that the audience had no idea anything was wrong.

Backstage Fun

This doesn’t even count the actual silly things we are SUPPOSED to be doing backstage in order to make the onstage work out. We crawl on hands and knees under the window, we drop suitcases full of junk down staircases, we stick sardines down our shirts, we guzzle “whiskey” off-stage so the bottle will be empty on stage, and we throw props back and forth seconds before we rush back on. Honestly if you had a camera back stage you wouldn’t be able to tell which is the show and which is reality.

Scene Changes

Noises Off also includes the best and most ambitious set I’ve ever seen at Santa Maria Civic Theatre. Act I takes place on stage, Act II takes place backstage, and Act III takes place on stage again. In order to accomplish this,  Director Cody Fogh and his crew spent hundreds of hours building this incredible set that is almost like another character.  It’s a two story monstrosity that actually rotates. You’ll really have to see it to believe it. You really can’t grasp the magic of the scene changes until you see it move with your own eyes. It’s almost worth the price of admission just to see the crew flip it around between acts.

Two More Weeks

Noises Off is a wild exhilarating ride that you won’t forget. Tickets are on sale now and we have two more weeks of this crazy mad-cap fun before we close. If you haven’t seen it yet, click the link and buy your tickets now!

The post Noises Off: The Hardest Show Ever appeared first on Santa Maria Civic Theatre.

The post Last Weekend for Kimberly Akimbo appeared first on Santa Maria Civic Theatre.

See all the videos in the Getting to Know Young Frankenstein Series

The post Getting to Know Young Frankenstein: Maureen & Stuart appeared first on Santa Maria Civic Theatre.

Two months ago I auditioned for Santa Maria Civic Theatre’s production of Young Frankenstein. At the time, director Sally Buchanan promised me (along with everyone else) that there was very little dancing in the show. I’d like to state, for the record, that this was a bald face lie. Not counting the small incidental songs, this show has NINE song and dance numbers. One of them is a full on tap dance.

Luckily for me (and also for you) I don’t actually tap dance. As Inspector Kemp, I get to sit and watch the rest of my villagers dance with Dr Fronkensteen and his monster. If I HAD been in the number, we’d still be rehearsing it, day and night (dancing is not my strong suit). The other seven members of the Young Frankenstein ensemble, many of whom had never even worn tap shoes, perform a confident and elegant dance number.

Let me tell you a tail…

Being a part of the Young Frankenstein ensemble is like high school all over again. Back then I was in a production of the Hobbit. My role was the grumpy red dragon, Smaug. Not his voice. I played the tail. It was my job to stick this seven-foot-long papier-mâché monstrosity out from the side of the stage and wiggle it back and forth. One night I wiggled it a bit too much and it broke. During the performance, I had to repair it with a broom stick and about two miles of duct tape.

For me, theatre will always be about the dichotomy of the quiet, dark, and frantic world of backstage paired with the bright, smiling on-stage production. I spent over two years traveling the country as a Tour Actor/Director with an organization called Missoula Children’s Theater. During those two years I directed children at 72 different theaters, high school gyms, churches, and one park pagoda. Let’s just say, I spent a lot of time backstage.

Sometimes it’s hot back there, and you fan the faces of your actors with your script. Sometimes it’s cold and they huddle for warmth against each other in their bright costumes. Sometimes it’s an expansive cavernous space in a 15,000 seat theater, and sometimes it’s the tiny stage in an elementary school cafeteria. It’s always quiet backstage though. A quiet that hums with the silent energy of actors holding their breath and nervously waiting for their turn.

Shrouded in Mystery

Sally did something different with our backstage. Something I’ve never seen at the Santa Maria Civic Theatre in the last twenty years. She took down the high fake walls we call flats and put up side curtains called wings. It gives on stage a sense of theatrical majesty you don’t get with a fully representational set. It also makes the backstage much more inclusive because now we can actually watch the action on stage while waiting for our turn.

Young Frankenstein Ensemble

I’ve been a part of this theatre for a long time, and this is my fifth play with the Santa Maria Civic Theatre since I stopped touring with MCT. It’s my first musical (that isn’t a cast of 60+ school children). Young Frankenstein is also the best time I’ve had backstage since high school.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think the highest praise you can get as a cast member is “You are such a professional”. I did a lot of work learning lines and making a character as Felix Humble in last year’s Humble Boy. At the end of the run, I felt like the cast truly created something together.

This show is different somehow. It feels less like sculpting and more like just squishing the clay between your fingers. Everyone always says this, but being part of the Young Frankenstein ensemble is like being part of a family. At some point between frantically pulling off lab coats, tying up the tap shoes, and zipping up each other’s dresses the play came together as a something more than just learning lines and songs. It’s about bursting together from that shadowy dark world of backstage and then rushing back again, tumbling over each other like puppies, and asking those magical four words, “What’s the next scene?”

Starting Soon!

Come and see the fun starting October 20th. Tickets are already on sale. Trust me, you won’t regret it.

The post Young Frankenstein Ensemble is Like High School All Over Again appeared first on Santa Maria Civic Theatre.

See all the videos in the Getting to Know Young Frankenstein Series

The post Getting to Know Young Frankenstein: Meg & Todd appeared first on Santa Maria Civic Theatre.

One of the things that we do try to do with the costumes is create almost these visual clusters of the characters so that you know that they belong together. The Dynamites, of course, are all wearing the same costumes, the same colors but different cuts so they have individual personality.

Tracy and Penny, who are best friends, they’re both wearing plaid most of the show so you can tell them that those two belong together. Amber Von Tussle and her mom Velma are both wearing blue quite frequently throughout the show. Amber Von Tussle’s costume is still full skirted, still very much late 50s kind of style. We wanted her to be very much a holdout with her style and her fashion. The Dynamites and Tracy are more of the late 60s moving into the 70s. More edgy interesting pieces. We wanted to kind of show their views with these costumes.

This is one of the costumes for motormouth Maybelle.Iit’s for her number big blonde and beautiful and we wanted it to be attention-grabbing. Really be a statement when she comes out. It is really just a declaration of who she is and what she is and her beliefs and who she is as a woman. We made it out of the gold lame and we made it into a wrap dress so that would be very easy for her to transition her costumes. This one is one of my personal favorite pieces it was just a lot of fun to construct and design it

Just to kind of show the contrast between Amber which is a full skirt with a fluted bodice vs Tracy’s really go-go 1960s kind of style. The lights in here don’t do it justice but when you see it on under the stage lights it’s sparkles and it’s just this vibrant tangible look at how Tracy’s spirit is throughout the show. That she is this vibrant, warm, exciting individual

if you haven’t yet make sure you get here to see hairspray for their final weekend and please do join us for spooky tales in Transylvania!

The post Hairspray Costumes appeared first on Santa Maria Civic Theatre.