With the curtain coming down on a glorious, gorgeous Beauty and the Beast over the weekend, this morning’s brightly shining dawn marks the beginning of our second half of Season 9! Sunday night a near capacity house thralled to the enchantment of Beth Stafford Laird’s Belle and Paul-Jordan Jansen’s Beast while the magnificent principal cast and ensemble enhanced the final evening with their virtuosic performance and our designers’ and crews’ theatrical achievement. Under the baton of Associate Conductor Charlotte Rivard-Hoster, voices and orchestra filled the palatial Paramount to its rafters with the rousing and sumptuous score of composer Alan Menken’s masterpiece. Amber Mak’s direction connected with holiday crowds, breaking all previous box office records with almost 100,000 guests in attendance over its ten week run!
We’re hitting this Broadway Series season’s halfway mark full speed ahead into the world premiere of composers Michael Mahler’s and Alan Schmuckler’s The Secret of My Success. Energy and spirits are high surrounding the completion of the first week of rehearsal on Saturday and the pace is relentless into this week. I’m under the gun here myself with meetings throughout the afternoon with the most head-spinning mash-up of songs bouncing around my brain from “Tale as old as time” to “The secret’s out! I’m in looove with youuu!” to Kinky Boots’ “Everybody Say Yeah!” A great perk to working in musical theater, I guess, right?!
Energy and spirits are high surrounding the completion of the first week of rehearsal on Saturday and the pace is relentless into this week.
It will be just like me today to catch myself humming in the halls of the North Island Center on the way to prepping for the announcement of the new series of Copley Theatre programming, Paramount’s Broadway Series Season 10 next year and my first sit-down with our newly appointed Chief Development Officer Jonathan Jensen. More about Jonathan later! He’s big news around here!
Keep a good thought!
Love & thanks,
Jim