The 2007-2008 season opened with 84 Charing Cross Road based on a true story by Helene Hanff, a New York book-lover & collector. It detailed her 20-year correspondence with the manager of the London second-hand bookshop at the title address. The two become good friends through their letters. The leads had a strong supporting cast in this wonderful story of human relationships. Ann Antkiw directed. After running for two weekends, the play performed at Club del Mar in Jaco in October, where it was well received by the audience, who came despite torrential rain.
Halloween 2007 was marked with a ghoulish party called Sing Zombie, Sing at the Tex Mex restaurant/bar in Santa Ana. Creative Kevin Huey engineered this fun event, and many LTG members turned out in ghastly and ghoulish costumes for the evening.
Christmas 2007 was marked in the traditional way with the El Grupo Ebano string quartet performing classical and Christmas music at the Casa 76 Restaurant in Santa Ana as part of our annual fundraiser for the Tom & Norman Home in Guapiles for abandoned elderly and the destitute.
The spring production opened with Hysteria directed by Susan Liang, and based on an actual meeting between Sigmund Freud and Salvadore Dali shortly before Freud’s death. It was a well attended, surreal production with some slap-stick scenes and slick action.
After Hysteria, came Twelve Angry Men, co-directed by Tom Humes and Lisa DeFuso. Running for three weekends, it was set in a rather tatty institutional Jury room in which the 12 disparate jurors agonize, argue and rant over a murder trial verdict with initially an 11 to 1 guilty vote in what seems an open-and-shut case. The large cast shone in their portrayals.
In July 2008 a new idea was put forward by Bob & Dorothy Allison to celebrate U.S. Independence Day by staging a Freedom Comedy Celebration with comic songs and skits. The three uproarious performances were greeted with laughter and applause and included songs such as, Hey, Dumb Gringo (a spoof on Hey, Big Spender, where a local lass picks up a tourist with a fat wallet), to Who is Hu? a conversation between Beijing and the White House, which poked fun at George W. Bush.
In September, The ladies staged the 2008-09 season opener with the musical Nunsense. Expertly directed by Dorothy Allison with Bob Allison, music director and Sheri Robinson, choreographer, the five sisters deal with the problem of raising enough cash to bury the last four of 52 nuns who have died from eating tainted Vichyssoise. This was a real romp and had many brilliant moments of high humor and wonderful singing.
Halloween weekend was celebrated with Kevin Huey’s Plan Nine from Outer Space, a totally off-the-wall plot with a sci-fi setting of aliens grave-robbing on Earth and bringing the dead back to life as zombies. This nutty production, combining original filmed scenes with stage scenes, had the audiences howling and clapping.
November and December 2008 saw the staging of the delightful and poignant Love Letters directed by Sally O’Boyle, with three different casts. Again in a correspondence mode, this play comprises 50 years of letters between off-and-on friends from early childhood to middle age, and shows the low and high points in their lives. In June 2009 the play headed to Guanacaste for a weekend performance.
A few days before Christmas 2008, El Grupo Ebano, for the sixth year in a row, performed the Angel of Love Concert in support of the Tom & Norman Home, once again at Casa 76 Italian Restaurant in Santa Ana.
Spring began with a four-week run of Calendar Girls, based on the movie, ingeniously adapted for the stage by Carolyn Kennedy, who also directed. The clever set designed by Dierdre Hyde, was the living room of a middle-class Yorkshire home, a flower nursery, and transformed into a glitzy Hollywood hotel lobby. Interspersed with the stage scenes were original movie scenes filmed by Kevin Huey.
Following the earthquake north of San José, LTG offered a special-priced fundraiser performance of Calendar Girls. In addition, several LTG members made cash contributions. With the auction held at the February Open House, more than $3,750 was collected and given to British Ambassador Tom Kennedy towards replacing a kindergarten wrecked by the ’quake.
The 2008-2009 season ended with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Set in a mental hospital in the 1960s the play is a gritty commentary on the primitive, often barbarous ways that psychiatric patients were controlled 40 years ago, along with a commentary on modern times and the mind control practiced by large corporations and governments. Conceived by Harry Towne, the show was directed by Sally O’Boyle, assisted by Lisa DeFuso, with Harry Towne as Technical Director.
Without the unflagging efforts of all the behind the scenes people there would be no plays at all. Kudos go to the directors and producers, techies up in the booth, set-builders and painters, those people who ferret out weird props items that directors demand, the costume-makers, hair and make-up people, the people who organize the ticket bookings, and of course the Teatro Laurence Olivier staff, who ably support our productions.
The Board of Directors has met monthly to work out future productions and projects, and is the often un-thanked backbone of LTG. Hearty thanks go out to you all. — Phil Copeland