Bride seeks erotic screen!

by Site Admin on Monday, October 13, 2008
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Newspapers, Personal, Production, STAC productions

Angela Lanyon’s new play, A Bride In The Hand, was premiered in Australia  earlier this year. This November STAC bring Bride to the UK, to be directed by the writer herself.

Some of the action centres round an erotic Indian screen, but the production team are still looking for something ornate enough.  Lanyon says “It should have three or four ‘leaves’ - preferably plain on one side and with a carved top.”

If anyone can help with the search this would be greatly appreciated.

For this produciton, many of the cast are new or fairly new to STAC.  Angela continues:

Rehearsals are going well and it should be a load of laughs. Marcus and Verity are both new members and are fitting in well and good to work with.  Gilliam Charles is newish, he was in Memory of Water and Children’s Theatre.  Ann Lancaster is a member of Rachel le Sauvage’s Chance to Act group.

We could still do with a helping hand for the lighting.

If you’re not a STAC member and therefore don’t receive complimentary tickets, look out for an upcoming competition in the  Worcester News!

Guest post: The Importance of Being Word Perfect

by Site Admin on Tuesday, September 23, 2008
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Personal, Production, STAC productions

A guest post from Kathryn Bellamy, playing Gwendolen Fairfax in the upcoming STAC production, The Importance of Being Earnest.

They say the most nerve-racking part of any production is the moment before you go on stage. I beg to differ; the most nerve-racking time in a production in this (very) amateur thesp’s opinion is two weeks before hand when you realise that you are the only member of a dedicated cast who is still fluffing her lines. Worse still, when you have several scenes which involve just you and one other person who is relying on you to give the correct cue in order to remember their own lines. This feeling of mounting panic alone can be enough to induce even the most confident of performers into sleeping with a copy of the script under their pillow.

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Dig In For Murder: cast list and artwork

by Site Admin on Friday, October 19, 2007
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Production, STAC productions

What better way to celebrate Christmas than to eat a merry buffet in a community atmosphere, drinking with friends, and trying to solve an intriguing puzzle — about a grizzly murder.

STAC’s fifth annual Christmas Buffet and Murder Mystery week will this year be debuting Dig In For Murder by Angela Lanyon. The play will run from Tuesday 4th to Saturday 8th December in the Swan Studio. A sumptuous buffet and a glass of wine is included in the ticket price. (There is also a preview on Monday 3rd and a matinée on the Saturday at which a lower ticket price includes a mince pie and a drink.)

Poster artwork is now linked from the play’s dedicated page and links to future production news will appear there as normal.

The cast is made up of STAC regulars with a few new faces thrown in for good measure. Julia Blois, Curtis Fulcher, Sue Imms, Sally Metcalfe and Michelle Whitfield have all trodden the boards for Swan Theatre Amateur Company productions in the past. And Dig In For Murder also features two newcomers to the Swan: Colin Potter an experienced actor from the Norbury Theatre in Droitwich, and Stuart Maggs, who has done a performance study related course at the Worcester College of Technology.

The murder mystery playwright herself, Angela Lanyon, is directing once again, with Rachel Le Sauvage as Assistant Director and Coach. Howerd Brooksbank is on sound and lights and Liz Whitehouse will be ably coordinating props and doubtless much else besides!

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New Season at the Swan!

by Site Admin on Tuesday, October 9, 2007
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Children's Theatre, Production, STAC news, STAC productions

Princess Tania and the Wicked Witch kicked off a new season of STAC plays at the Swan this weekend. The first Children’s Theatre show of the 2007-2008 run had a fun cast and a great post-summer audience, including the usual 90% of children who all miraculously have birthdays to celebrate when they are called up on stage!

Next month… it’s Jill in the Box! Anyone interested in possibly performing for Children’s Theatre can make contact through the website and your email will be passed on to the Children’s Theatre organisers.

And tonight is the debut of Alan Ayckbourn’s Relatively Speaking.

Building the set at the weekend

Another of Andy Hares’ marvellous sets is in place, and the backstage crew outnumber the cast by more than two to one, so it should all run smoothly… relatively speaking.

If you want to see what the set looks like now it’s finished — and discover just who lives at The Willows, Lower Pendon, Bucks — then buy a ticket! The box office as ever is 01905 611427 and the show runs from tonight until Saturday at 7.30pm at the Swan.

Director Liz Whitehouse on STAC’s Festival play 2007

by Site Admin on Monday, July 2, 2007
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Personal, Production, STAC productions

The dedicated page for STAC’s next production is here: One for the Road.

Willy Russell — the playwright who also wrote Educating Rita, Blood Brothers and Shirley Valentine — penned One for the Road in 1979, but the humour, and the characters’ entrapment in a bland “phase two” suburban housing estate, are thoroughly recognisable in the twenty-first century.

Liz Whitehouse is directing the show in the Swan Studio. She grew up in Harrow, North West London, trained for librarianship in Birmingham, and later worked in the Gambia, stocking and organising school libraries and training staff and pupils how to run them. But even surrounded by books in the Gambia, her theatrical leanings were evident. “While there I was able to learn Scottish dancing, have my first taste of performing in operetta (Merry England), and take up theatricals again, oh! and travel around west Africa,” she says.

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Warning signs from theatreland?

by Site Admin on Sunday, June 24, 2007
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National, Newspapers, Production, STAC productions

As Andy Hare’s newest set makes its way from the workshop to the stage today for STAC’s latest production, Popcorn (starting this Tuesday), there are two pieces of bad news for theatre-lovers.

So far the STAC blog has only had good news to convey from the nationals. But the Guardian this week reported that:

William Shakespeare’s 400-year reign as the world’s primary transmitter of the English language has finally been ended — by John, Paul, George and Ringo and their album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

An academic conference heard yesterday that the collection of songs [...] has overtaken Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet as a global cultural reference point.

Which is good news if you like the Beatles, but no so good if you like the Bard. And there’s a less ambiguous bit of news about the “now-dilapidated” Bristol Old Vic theatre, reported in the Times.

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Will onstage drama go up in smoke?

by Site Admin on Wednesday, June 6, 2007
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National, Newspapers, Production

On the day that new provisions allowing actors to smoke on stage in Northern Ireland are being introduced to the Stormont assembly (see the Guardian), there still seem to be some conflicting messages about the applicability of the smoking ban to actors in England.

Can actors, whether on stage — or during rehearsals — legally smoke in closed areas in England after the July 1st smoking ban comes into effect? The STAC blog tries to clear things up.

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The fake Empire cover

by Site Admin on Saturday, May 26, 2007
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Production, STAC productions

STAC’s summer season show, Popcorn (26th-30th June) has been in rehearsals for a number of weeks now. With little over four weeks left until performance, production is ramping up. The lighting designer, Emma Fawson, is at work on the complicated lighting plot, our stage manager, Chris Harper, is juggling all manner of props, from an Oscar statuette to a pair of pink furry handcuffs. And there’s still lots of work to be done: the show involves plenty of special effects and live video footage relayed to the stage (fortunately director Marc Dugmore has years of professional technical experience!)

Here is just one example of the level of detail that production design can get down to…

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