Party On, Actor Dudes!

 Last night was the annual ACE Christmas Party!  It was our turn to celebrate our accomplishments over the past year, and of course, an excuse to PARTAY!  We had turkey, ham and all the trimmings - the usual ACE feast prepared by ACE Artistic Director Joe Zingo, ACE Executive Producer Jim Roberts, Box Office Manager Gaylord Walker and ACE Music Director Marc Innocenti.  We had a lot of special guests, including our local playwrights Dorothy Velasco, Greg Foote and Chuck Nathan, all of whom have had World Premiere’s of their shows produced at ACE.  Also in attendance were several members of the local media,  our fabulous ushers and support staff and a large number of actors consuming quantities of free beer!

As always, one of the highlights was showing footage of our last years productions.  It’s easy to forget about the long hours, the stage fright and the hard work when you get to see it all on the big screen with your friends.  And no one who was there will forget the preview of ALTAR BOYZ!  This musical is going to rock the house hard when it opens in January!  Eugene hasn’t seen anything like it!  On a personal note; I liked the Christmas Carol sing-a-long.  Nothing can be more fun than a bunch of actors singing Christmas Carols at the top of their lungs…or maybe you had to be there!

Of course, the party is just a pause in our crazy Christmas schedule.  We have six performances of two different shows coming up this weekend, several of which are SOLD OUT.  Then it’s off to the Hult!  Monday morning we load up the truck and go uptown for our 4 performances of A CHRISTMAS CAROL.  This is going to be fun:  Take a show that we’ve performed before sell out crowds for four years running, make the cast even larger, add on a bunch of new sets and props, change the lighting, the costumes, the choreography and the blocking and the theater –  and put it all together in a week!  Yippee!!

Most theaters in Eugene can only manage to do one show at a time.  What’s the fun in that?  Where’s the thrill, the excitement?  What good is it do theater is you’re not always challenging yourself?  I think that’s one of the reasons we keep attracting new audiences and the most exciting actors; ACE is quite simply, the most ambitious theater in town!

“Ace”