Facts: Alive Theatre presents the 2nd Annual Cherry Poppin’ Play Festival, which starts this Friday aboard the Queen Mary in the Royal Theatre. 6 plays over 3 nights, repeated for three weekends. Individual tickets and discount festival packages are available.
Ambition. People talk about it like they know what it is. Some folks think waking up in the morning is ambitious and, for some, it may be. The high energy enthusiasm of The Alive Theatre group has pushed the concept of ambition to the edge of sanity. For example, some fresh-faced young actors might think that putting on a play is ambitious. For The Alive Theatre, they decided to produce 6 plays. Not just any 6 plays they had laying around, or tried and true classics. No. These had to be original, fresh, new, unproduced plays written by ambitious authors looking to make their way in the world. Six directors, countless actors, technical people, and all kinds of other folks all working together, for free, to create something really amazing and, dare I say it again, ambitious.
Alive Theatre is basically homeless. They don’t have an ‘official’ performance space of their own. This year, they’ve taken over the Queen Mary’s Royal Theatre for the festival. It’s cozy, but large enough to accomodate a few more than 100 people. In addition to the ticket price, the Queen Mary charges a rather steep parking fee of $12. Car pool, or take advantage of the Passport Shuttle C from Downtown, which runs to the Queen Mary every 10 minutes.
The plays are extremely diverse. Some are surreal, others painfully real. Some are comedic, and others tragic. What they all have in common is that they’re short. Over the course of three 3 day weekends (F-S) starting this Friday night, they’ll present 2 plays per night. On Fridays, check out The Adventure Play and Under The Great Boobie Hatch. On Saturdays, catch Squat and Public Service. On Sundays, you’ll find The Mother of God Visits Hell, and Stratovolcanoe.
We were talking about ambition before, right? This is a festival, and the Alive Theatre crew were not satisfied by simply presenting 6 new plays 3 times over three 3 day weekends. No! What’s a festival without music? Not very festive, I say! So, in addition to the plays, each evening will open with a set of music by talented local music artists. Free Moral Agents, The Year Zero, SloMo Erotic, Big Death, Avi Buffalo, Matt Kollar and the Angry Mob, Bed Breakfast Man, The Red River, and Dietra Kruschev will each play on one of the 9 performance nights.
Can I say that there was even talk of including a visual art gallery outside the Royal Theatre, but that may have proved to be too ambitious.
Rest assured that all 9 performances will sell out, so do not hesitate to score your tickets asap! Seriously.