Downtown Mobile’s Crescent Theater stacked its late-winter calendar with a run of one-week exclusives, a Mardi Gras cult classic and an Oscar-nominated holdout, starting Friday, Feb. 11, with “Made in Dagenham” for a single week.
From England’s Factory Floor
The British dramedy dramatizes the real 1968 strike at Ford’s Dagenham car plant, where female workers walked out over sexual discrimination and helped force the fight for equal pay onto the national stage. The film portrays its working-class heroines — equal parts kitchen, factory floor and Top of the Pops — as unlikely architects of lasting social change.
Theater Scramble Comes to the Screen
On Saturday, Feb. 19 at noon, the Crescent screened the first-ever Theatre Scramble Mobile performance, filmed live at the Mobile Museum of Art by Jolt Productions. A “theater scramble” challenges local performers to devise a short play under a brutally tight deadline before everyone reconvenes to perform the results. Sign-ups for the second scramble opened right after the screening.
What Followed
The slate rolled on from there: Danny Boyle’s “127 Hours” for a week, then two weeks of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” timed to Mardi Gras, and finally “The Illusionist” on March 11. That last date carried an apology from the theater: after the animated film earned an Academy Award nomination, prints became extremely hard to secure, forcing repeated scheduling changes before it could finally reach Mobile screens.