So, what to do about theatre?

Back in February or March, I decided to take a break from theatre.  Specifically, from auditioning.  I still have "42nd Street" in late-May/early-June.  I still have "Henry V" at Pennsic, in early August.  Beyond that, I have nothing planned.  After "Angels in America", I haven't auditioned for anything.  I toyed with the idea of auditioning for "Our Town" and "Arsenic and Old Lace", but those didn't happen. 

I did spend some time with the script for "Vamp" (or "Vampe", the current working title), with Matt from Viviana.  The play text is complete at this point, although we are tweaking it according to some suggestions from a play reading we had in April.  Matt still has to write a few songs, and he has two hours of music to compose.  He has entered the play in a contest.  If we get past the first part of the contest, we will have until the beginning of September to finish the entire play, for the second part of the contest.  If we win, the play will be produced off-Broadway!  If we don't win, I guess we continue with our original plan of finding a venue in Philadelphia.  Matt is serious about staging this play!

After "42nd Street", Matt will be working on a production of "Rent".  My younger son will be in two "youth productions", "Cinderella" and "Annie".  That means I'll probably wind up getting involved somehow.  I'm sure Matt will find the time to work on the music!

So, what about my idea of starting up my own theatre company?  I'm not thinking about anything until after "42nd Street".  Jen's idea is to start smaller: just put on one show, rather than start a whole company.  This means finding a venue, finding a script, finding a director, holding auditions, figuring out how much this will cost, and figuring out fundraising.  This is very intimidating for me!  My stated goal is to reach out to minorities for lead roles . . . how the heck do I do that? 

I had a thought of doing something even smaller.  I need to look in to copyright rules and royalties.  I was reading "Equus" the other day, and I started wondering: what if a couple of us got together and performed this script in front of a microphone?  And what if we took the sound recording of this and uploaded it to Youtube (the visual part might be nothing more than the word "Equus")?  I should contact the people that own the rights to "Equus" to see if this is even allowed.  Certainly, if they were going to charge money for this, I couldn't do it (I'll need to find a different script).  Basically, I'm thinking about using Youtube as a venue to perform the equivalent of radio plays.  Maybe, if I did enough of these, eventually someone would watch one! 

It looks like this summer, I should have time to play around with these ideas.