No more Ruth

Pirates closed last night. After spending the past few months having so much fun with these people, and Pirates being such a fun show, this is another one I'm gonna miss. Good thing we've got the cast party coming up next Saturday, to ease the pain of "withdrawal". ;-)

One of the audience members last night came up to me after the show and told me she was "eating [her] heart out", as she'd played Ruth herself five times! We had a fun, if short, chat about how much fun Ruth is to do, G&S roles she'd played, which ones were the "best" to do, and so on.

We had our biggest audience last night - they even added a row of 6 or 7 seats to accommodate the demand. Last night's crowd included 2 Birdie alumnae, who were vocal in their appreciation, and my recent voice teacher and one of her daughters. It was flattering to have so many people to talk to afterwards, but also a little frustrating, as it meant I didn't get to talk to any of them for more than a few minutes, when what I wanted to do was sit down and talk with them for a few hours. My Birdie friends did get pictures of the 3 of us together; I'm hoping they turned out.

Our Edith was being quite the shutterbug backstage last night. This was a good thing, because I had forgotten to put my camera in my theater bag, so I got only a few pics of people in the costumes I busted my butt to put together. "Edith" also got a few pictures of Mabel wearing the hat I made for her, so I have that for future reference. I hope someone got a picture of the MG's "uniform" with the medals - they looked very good indeed under the lights. "Edith" also took lots and lots of group shots; so many, she was talking about putting all her photos on CDs to give people at the cast party next week.

Strike was amazingly quick - less than an hour! This was due in no small part to the fact of our relatively minimalist set. Our director & her husband did a very nice job designing a set that suggested the scene without requiring a lot of construction, and the production used very few props. I was surprised to see that the next show in the space was already painting over our set while we were still taking things down and putting them away. They couldn't have waited until the next day?

Costume strike also went very quickly. Being able to put most of the Act I costumes (all but a few pirate costumes) into the collection bags & boxes at intermission helped a lot. To my relief, all the bags & boxes fit into my car, too. Now to haul it all inside, inventory it, clean the washables, haul the dry-clean-only stuff to the discount cleaners...