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A Spirited Closing: Performance Number Twenty-Five

And so it comes to an end with our final matinee performance. I was joined on the stage by Mark, Darren and Robyn, with Matt and Dana holding down the fort in the tech booth, Gina keeping watch from the house, and Jim and Keith keeping us moving from the pit. Today I did a little Math... With 25 public performances and two public previews, Jim and Keith have improvised 594 songs and parodies during the course of the run!! That deserves some kind of prize!

We had a lovely and generous audience in attendance, including several of my colleagues (Kevin, Lisa, Seth, Kelly and Dawn) and students from Rollins. In fact, our first character of the night, Jorge, was a former improv student. Mark took on this role as a cookie-store worker under the watchful eye of Mrs. Roberto. Jorge wanted to buy a ring for his love, Robyn's Rongobo (?!), but was thwarted by the stifling cameras watching his every movement, and his friend's constant need to have his raw cookie dough addiction fed. Darren then gave us Vince, a young man quickly making his live-in girlfriend, Heather, a football widow. Despite the warnings from his mother that he was following his father's ill path to destruction, and the overt romantic ovations of his friend Robert towards his woman, Vince continued to make bad choices and neglect his poor ignored love. The first act entered the realm of the supernatural with Robyn's Dawn who lived in an apartment above her parent's garage. When her friend, Cecilia, brought a hat to their seance on the eve of Dawn's wedding, a scorned spirit warned her that her betrothed, Jerry, was not all that he seemed. (In fact, we quickly learned that Cecilia and Jerry were developing a romance of their own). Finally, I was Chris, a mountain hiker with an emaciated girlfriend, Cheri, a nosy ex-lover, Geraldine, and a Native-American spirit and track guide, Rising Sun. Jim threw me a particularly interesting challenge for a solo, offering the theme song of Indian Jones!

Act two became a super-natural occurrence as we followed Robyn's Dawn into her pre-wedding panic. Jerry enlisted the cookie-dough addict to delay Dawn's arrival at the wedding while he continued to court his beloved Cecilia (no prizes for guessing what parody song appeared here!) Seeking advice, she went to her mother (also the mother of Vince) who advised her to "take off her shirt" and look inside herself. Summoning the feminine figure again, she was further encouraged to stand on her own to feet (to the tune of "Unchained Melody" - Jim was really throwing me some challenges today!) Jerry and Cecilia's betrayal was finally revealed in one of our more disturbing duet/dance sequences in which the lustful couple was seen in a series of awkward gymnastic positions. Mark gave a great show topping number as the emaciated Cheri, seeing love wherever she looked, and after one last push from her spirit guide, Dawn finally stood up to her husband-not-to-be, asserting her independence in a "I am woman, hear me roar" homage.

We received a generous standing ovation today, which was a nice way to go out, and while the show got a little dicy in its content at times, it made it to the station on time.

Thank you to the company for the lovely framed show poster, and to our generous and loyal audiences for their support during the run.

Any favourite show memories involving myself, Mark, Robyn or Darren as a comment?

This will probably be my penultimate entry... I'm planning on one final musing when the dust settles. (We go into tech for The Lost Comedies of William Shakespeare at the end of the week!!)

Your living-in-the-land-of-the-Bard Director, David C.