The Fairy Tale Ball!

The Fairy Tale Ball was one of the best evenings we’ve had in a long time.  The Urbana Free Library stays open late one evening a year to host The Fairy Tale Ball, a library wide event for kids of all ages to come and celebrate reading and fairy tales.  We were one of several entertainers invited to perform for the ball – a real honor for us local buskers.  So, in honor of the ball we prepped and premiered two new books for our show…

The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch and Michael Martchenko…

…and Falling for Rapunzel by Leah Wilcox and Lydia Monks.  

I’ve been wanting to adapt these two books for a long time and the Fairy Tale Ball was the perfect motivator to get them on the boards.  Maggie (my daughter and performance partner), Jenna ( my wife and our paint charge), and  I worked really hard to get these ready, and it paid off.  The performances went really well and the kids LOVED’em.  My lovely wife managed to record a little bit of each performance on her phone and instead of trying to describe them to you I’d like to just show you a bit.  So here are a couple of clips from our premiere performances of The Paper Bag Princess and Falling for Rapunzel.  Enjoy.

These two pieces will definitely be part of our repertoire for a long while.

Riding the Roller Coaster.

I’ve always compared a good movie, a good play, and life in general to a roller coaster ride – lots of ups and downs, highs and lows, terrifying and thrilling, and always and adventure.  Wheeeeeeeee!  Well, I’ve been looking over some of my older blog posts and re-read the one telling myself to NOT PANIC about my lack of gigs.   Well, my roller coaster has taken a huge change in direction and I have been booking gigs for the fall and summer.  Suddenly I am not panicking about having no work, but starting to panic about all of the new work I have to do.  Looking back, I would much rather panic about having too much work instead of panicking about not enough.  Wheeeeeeee!

Speaking of new work (talk about clever segues) I have been hired to perform at the Urbana Free Library in April for their annual Fairy Tale Ball!  And since I don’t have a lot of “fairy tale” stories in my repertoire, I suddenly find myself in a slightly panicky building mode to adapt Robert Munsch’s The Paper Bag Princess and Leah Wilcox’s Falling for Rapunzel for this event.

 

Granted, the Fairy Tale Ball isn’t until April, but I also do an annual gig with Sugar Creek Elementary School in Bloomington, IL where I turn their Young Author books into live puppet shows.  More on these projects later.

So, I am looking at hunkering down in the workshop for the next three months working on four new puppet plays.  Wheeeeeeeeee!