Sunday, January 20, 2013

ROUGH DRAFT closes well

     
 
   ROUGH DRAFT closed today after a limited run. I surprise myself by being more disappointed in that fact than I expected to be.

    Certainly the fact of closing doesn’t bother me. I have written many plays, they all have an opening night, a run, a close, and – hopefully – someone somewhere will pick them up and the whole process starts again. Hopefully.

    And I wasn’t expecting a great deal from the company that optioned ROUGH DRAFT. They are the “Shots In The Dark Independent Theatre Company.” … uh-huh. A young group this, figuratively and literally. To my jaded eyes they were children of the old Mickey Rooney school – “Wow, gang, let’s get a barn and do a show!” (And, I suspect, they picked my show to produce because it purposely is inexpensive to stage.)

  Further, I knew from the one rehearsal I saw, they were largely inexperienced in the comedic timing necessary to pace this thing correctly.

  But – I give them this – they had talent. On each performance night they learned something new, and the show was improving measurably by the time the run ended.

 So. Will this work be done again? I suspect it will. Audiences liked it. But I would have liked to have seen this group have a handful of more shots at it, just to see how far they could have taken it.

 
j

 
 
 
 

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