Hi, friends.
Happy Almost Spring! We hope you and yours are well.
The pandemic crawls on and we’re still asking our audiences to mask for indoor events, but it does seem as if the world may be learning how to live with this pesky coronavirus.
This summer we staged our return to Shakespeare in Nichols Park: at the end of July: Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Susan Harris.
And we’ve announced our 2022-23 Season. We’re hoping our old friend SARS-COV doesn’t have any more significant curve balls to pitch at us, so we’re planning to stay live. Stay vaxxed and stay tuned!
A look back at how we got here:
In Fall 2020, in our biggest pandemic production, the Players re-imagined of our traditional October Evening of Horror & Suspense for a “new-fangled, physically-distanced tradition.” Susan Harris directed the actors in zoomed rehearsals. Corinna Christman, with Bill Hohnke, Logan Conley and Rachel Baker, created the sound design, and edited and live-streamed on our Youtube the four different stories on the evenings of October 30 and 31st, 2020. You can listen to both those shows by clicking through on the link above.
Late this past summer, we successfully staged our Pop-Up Shakespeare in Nichols Park, scenes from Shakespeare running simultaneously at three stations in the park, starting at 6 pm, Fridays & Saturdays, August 20-21, 27-28 and September 3-4, and rain date, Friday, September 10, 2021.
With that successfully accomplished, we turned our attention to our first in-person, live mainstage production since the pandemic shut us down: last year’s 12th Annual Evening of Horror & Suspense, which we presented October 29 & 30, 2021. All involved Players and all audience members were vaccinated and masked; audience seating was kept to a certain low density; Players unmasked to perform. Both nights of performance were well attended–the second night was sold out!–and there was much joy at being able to come together to occupy (safely) our shared spaces.
With our August 2021 Friday Staged Reading we had begun our transition back from Zoom to in-person, indoor theater! We presented Christopher Fry’s A Phoenix Too Frequent to an enthusiastic, though small and masked audience on the first Friday of the Month. We continue our tradition of Friday Staged Readings (in person if we safely can). Through November 2021 , the Reading made way for other Players events, but we were back in person in December with Stories & Songs of the Season. Although we took a hiatus in January 2022 as we gave time for clarity to emerge about omicron, conditions allowed us to return February 11 for The Terrie Gaia Plays. And we read and sang for our March 4 Staged Reading of most of the first act of #MonteCristo2020, an original musical, by Susan Harris & Bill Hohnke, based on the perennially popular novel The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas.
We returned to the stage for our May 6-8, 13-15, 2022 live, in-person production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being #Earnest, directed by Corinna Christman.
The Players are continuing to brainstorm and plan ways to bring you theater within the constraints of the world we all find our selves in. We’ll try to keep the website up to date as plans mature and dates are set, but we also encourage you to subscribe to our e-mail list (at the bottom of the homepage of this website) and to watch our Facebook page for up-to-the-minute news of what’s happening at Hyde Park Community Players.
Here’s hoping for live theater to continue and thrive in 2022 and into 2023! We look forward to emerging into each new phase of our progress through this strange time, and we hope you’ll enjoy traveling with us.
Stay safe. Be well and happy!
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