This weekend was the Riverside Dickens Faire. For the last several years now I've been involved with the Queen's Tea show at First Congregational Church. Yeah, me, doing a show at a church. Hey, it's a cool church.
They put out a very nice meal with tea and a music hall show. There are fresh-baked scones, finger sandwiches, pastries, fruit, and chocolates, lemon curd, jam and clotted cream. It's really quite good.
The music hall show is written and directed by a dear man named Chris. Over the years there have been many different people involved with the show, but usually the cast will consist of three or four people. This year it was to be Chris, me, a guy named Walt and a girl named Bethie. Walt had done the show twice before. He's not an experienced actor, but he's got a lot of enthusiasm and he's very pleasant to be around. This was Bethie's first time with the show. She's sixteen years old and has an amazing and mature singing voice. Everything started off in the usual way, but very quickly the show got into trouble. Chris became very ill with a nasty mix of ailments, with pneumonia leading the pack.
At first there was very little communication with Chris' family. Walt and I were reluctant to pester them with our issues about the show, but we really needed to know how to proceed. Eventually we found out that Chris was in bad shape. I also found out that the Dickens committee at the church had had a meeting where it was announced that two hundred tickets had already been sold, and that Donita could dive in and take over (and no, Donita wasn't at this meeting but heard about it the next day from Walt). So, ok, here we go.
Mr. Walt basically leapt into action with emails and texts, while I privately bitched and whined about not wanting to do what I knew I would end up doing. Whatever Chris had planned for the show had to be rewritten without him. We had the recorded piano parts from last year on a cd, and the story idea he had come up with for this year. Walt hunted down the missing sheet music and converted the piano music to an mp3. I began to write dialog. Two scripts were needed; one for the show that included Queen Victoria, and one for the non-queen shows. Both scripts had to tell basically the same story
So here it is-
Mr. Treacle (Chris) took on a protege for the show this year. She's a young, high-born girl who just wants to act upon the stage. Since she's an aristocrat, this activity is forbidden to her. Her real name is Felicity Farthingale, but she's calling herself Maisie Duckett. Dame Hermione Fabersham (me) has been with Mr. Treacle's show for years and is very suspicious of this new girl. Mr. Broderick Bumblepitch (Walt) is a wealthy benefactor of the music hall who just loves to perform, and is completely smitten with Dame Hermione.
The show is ready to begin but Mr. Treacle is nowhere to be seen. Dame Hermione receives a note, flies into a panic and shares the news with Maisie and Broderick. Mr. Treacle has had an unfortunate encounter with a carriage horse which resulted in him receiving a well-placed kick upon his bum. The poor man cannot perform and the rest of the cast must make some hasty changes to the show before the queen shows up. When the queen arrives, Hermione introduces the cast to her. She recognizes Felicity/Maisie, but doesn't expose her just yet. Hermione's suspicion goes into high gear and Maisie gets verrry nervous.
As the show progresses, the queen from time to time plays a bit of cat-and-mouse with Maisie. The dialog links a total of nine songs together. At the end of the show Maisie is exposed as the daughter of a lord, Hermione is furious, Broderick convinces her that Maisie's father may send his patronage their way when he hears of the enjoyable and diverting afternoon the queen spent in their music hall, and all's well that end's well. Huzzah.
For the non-queen show we had Felicity's cousin Jeffrey (played by a guy named Jeff) show up in the audience. When Hermione and Broderick leave the room, he pounces on Felicity/Maisie and threatens to tell her father about the whole thing. Felicity/Maisie begs him to let her perform just this once. Jeffrey (a bit of a cad) agrees to not tell her father, but lets her know he expects her to return the favor one day. The show goes on and in the end Felicity/Maisie is exposed and so on and so forth. Huzzah.
And so we commenced to rehearsin'. We had three weeks to pull it together.
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