GULF SHORES, Ala. — South Baldwin Community Theatre has announced the lineup for its 55th season, a slate of 12 productions that begins with this month’s staging of “The Play That Goes Wrong” and runs through a winter play festival.
Eleven productions follow the current show, spanning benefit concerts, family theatre, comedy and an improvised festival format.
The Announced Lineup
- Oct. 22 — “An Afternoon with Peter, Jim and Brendan Mayer,” a benefit event supporting The Parrot Head Emergency Foundation.
- Nov. 6–15 — “The Wind in the Willows.”
- Dec. 3–4 — Four A Change presents “Our Favorite Things.” Tickets are $25.
- Jan. 7–17 — “I Hate Hamlet.”
- Feb. 26–27 — The 24-Hour Play Festival, Winter Edition.
What the Season Says About the Programming
The announced titles cover a deliberately wide range, which is characteristic of community theatre scheduling. A season has to serve several audiences at once — families, subscribers who want comedy, patrons who attend benefits and performers looking for something unusual to work on.
“The Wind in the Willows,” adapted from Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 novel about Mole, Rat, Badger and the irrepressible Mr. Toad, is the family anchor of the fall. Stage adaptations of the book have been a staple of community and regional theatre for decades, in part because the story supports a large cast with roles suitable for performers of varying experience.
“I Hate Hamlet,” Paul Rudnick’s 1991 comedy, is a backstage farce about a television actor who reluctantly takes on the title role in “Hamlet” and is visited by the ghost of John Barrymore. It is a smaller-cast show with a strong comic engine — a common January choice, when audiences are recovering from holiday programming.
The 24-Hour Play Festival
The 24-Hour Play Festival, scheduled for Feb. 26-27, is the most unusual item on the calendar. In the standard format, writers, directors and actors gather in the evening, plays are written overnight, rehearsed during the day and performed the following night — the entire cycle compressed into a single day.
The format is popular with theatres because it produces genuinely original work, involves a large number of volunteers in a short window and creates an event audiences cannot see anywhere else. For performers, it is an intensive exercise in preparation under pressure. For audiences, the appeal is partly the work and partly the tightrope.
The October Benefit
The Oct. 22 event, “An Afternoon with Peter, Jim and Brendan Mayer,” supports The Parrot Head Emergency Foundation. Benefit programming of this kind allows a theatre to lend its venue and audience to a cause while diversifying what happens on its stage between mainstage productions.
Sponsorships and Volunteers
Several levels of sponsorships are available for the season. The theatre is also recruiting volunteers to assist with a range of behind-the-scenes tasks.
Volunteers can help welcome patrons, build sets and support productions in many other ways.
That appeal is not a formality. Community theatres of this size typically run on a small paid staff supported by a large volunteer base, and the work extends well beyond acting: set construction, painting, costumes, props, lighting and sound operation, box office, ushering and concessions. For people interested in theatre without wanting to perform, these are the entry points — and they are generally the roles hardest for a theatre to fill.
Fifty-Five Seasons
Reaching a 55th season places South Baldwin Community Theatre among the longer-running community theatres on the Alabama Gulf Coast. Organizations that survive that long generally do so by maintaining a subscriber base, keeping production costs proportionate to ticket revenue and continually recruiting new volunteers as longtime ones step back.
Information on tickets, sponsorship levels and volunteer opportunities is available through South Baldwin Community Theatre in Gulf Shores.