COLUMN: Update on virtual Sundance festival, Theatre Macon performances and more
If you want to attend an in-person Sundance Film Festival screening in 2021, you can head downtown to The Douglass Theatre in late January.
As COVID-19 forced the Macon Film Festival to have only a few live screenings and put the majority online, it’s doing the same to Sundance, arguably the largest, most well-known U.S. film festival. Officials announced Wednesday there will only be a few live showings in its hometown of Park City, Utah, with most presentations going online.
Plus, Sundance is adding live-feed satellite viewing sites around the world and Macon is one.
More information is coming about Douglass shows and watching the festival virtually from home, but you can get started sorting things out now at sundance.org.
Bringing the festival here – Atlanta is the only other satellite location announced in Georgia – is largely due to a relationship already in place between Sundance and MFF. Among the connections are Sundance Institute workshops presented in Macon in years past sponsored by MFF.
‘Thrilled’ to participate
Steven Fulbright, the Macon festival’s board president and director of tourism at Visit Macon, made the announcement locally Wednesday saying how “thrilled” he, MFF and The Douglas were to be a satellite screen location.
He told me more particulars about what’s happening will roll out when he gets them in a couple of weeks. Just like the 2020 MFF virtual festival, this is all new to Sundance organizers, who are themselves scurrying to put it all together.
Sundance’s Dates are Jan. 28 through Feb. 3. Its 2020 festival was just ahead of the coronavirus crisis.
Silver linings
Without daring to say there’s anything good about the pandemic, we all know in the midst of the storm there are silver linings, like Sundance coming to town.
For more instances, take productions starting this weekend at two Middle Georgia community theaters: Theatre Macon’s “Holiday Follies” and The Perry Players’ “A Christmas Carol: The Musical.’”
Starting with Perry, the year’s circumstances mean the directorial debut of 18-year-old Hanna Kemp, who got involved with her first Perry Players production when she was 12.
This is not only her debut as a director but a showcase for what you’d have to call her gumption and the community’s commitment to its playhouse.
But if this whets your appetite to see her “Christmas Carol” debut and you don’t have tickets, tough luck: the dozen-show run has already sold out.
“’Christmas Carol was already part of the 2020-21 season but all our shows have been getting canceled one by one,” Kemp said. “It didn’t have a director and it wasn’t looking like it or anything would get done for the season. No shows meant no money coming in for Perry Players and no funds to put on a full-scale musical.”
Kemp went to the group’s board with the idea she would direct it for free and put together a live, COVID-19 safe show at no cost to the theater. It would be done based on donated efforts of participants and money and goods given from the community. In essence, the show would be a fundraiser and an opportunity for the community to attend live theater.
Knowing Kemp and her music and performing abilities, the board said OK and, long story short, she’s done it.
Search out some of the steps along the way on the Perry Players’ and Kemp’s Facebook and Instagram accounts and you’ll see the production is not a scrapping-by effort but an amazing looking one that bodes well for a great show.
But not a lone effort. A self-confessed “theater gal,” Kemp searched out opportunities with the Players and other drama groups on her own as a young, pre-teenager and also showed her theatrical/entrepreneurial bent right off the bat by getting her family to volunteer, if hesitantly, to audition and get involved themselves.
The bug bit them and they’ve been doing community theater ever since.
For “Christmas Carol,” Kemp’s mom, Lucy – a former rock and roll drummer, that’s right – volunteered to do choreography, her brother, Brandon, is musical director, and father, Chris, is doing sets. A lot of others followed suit with services and goods given at no cost following Kemp’s lead as pro bono director.
So bad circumstances yielded a creative opportunity and results that will, no doubt, play out positively in bigger ways in the future.
On social media, Richard Frazier, Theatre Macon’s artistic director, has been complimentary of Kemp and what the Perry Players are pulling off to stage the show and end 2020.
Holiday Follies online-only
This weekend, Theatre Macon begins its own virtual, online-only run of “Holiday Follies.” Tickets and more information about times and dates are at theatremacon.com/tickets.
“They’ve done a great job in Perry,” he said. “I’ve followed it and been pretty excited seeing what the Kemp family and others have done. The fact it sold out shows people love and want live theatre. Each theater, every group, has had to figure out what to do and how to best do it for their own community. The thing is there’s no roadmap for us on how to do all this. We’re all doing our best under the circumstances to wisely make it up as we go.”
Theatre Macon was early to get online with virtual programming for its audience.
“The theatre community as a whole has had to pivot and pivot hard this year,” he said. “Like everybody everywhere, we’ve taken a lot of blows and had to adapt and do things differently while learning to do a lot of new things. Nothing is like the experience of live theater but if you can’t do that, what do you do?
“For us, we turned to online presentations and have had to learn and keep learning how to do it. I never trained for movie production so there was a big learning curve that keeps going. At the beginning of all this about eight months ago, a Zoom-style presentation was fine but we couldn’t stick with that and say we were being true to the quality of entertainment Theatre Macon is known for. We had to improve our production and I think ‘Holiday Follies’ is a good example.”
Frazier said the “Follies” presents well over two-dozen song, dance, monologue and comedy segments featuring regulars from near and far as well as other community performers and two local dance groups, Hayiya Dance Theatre and Madison Studio.
Frazier said the show encompasses a variety of musical and entertainment styles and samples and celebrates many holiday observances and traditions.
“It’s a showcase of different styles of music, dance, acting and performers that I hope will give people something to bond over during the holidays,” he said. “We’re even doing something from ‘Nutcracker’ because we know people are really missing that this year. Part of the excitement for the show comes from the fact many of the numbers were suggested by the performers so there is a big sense of collaboration. We’ve got a few original songs, too.”
So keeping with the theme of silver linings, it’s good to note members of the Macon-Middle Georgia arts and entertainment community aren’t only finding ways – new ways and ways they’re not always comfortable with – to entertain and put on shows but beyond that to let art and music and performers do their work to remind us of our connectedness and that life and the holidays still have their shared fun and smiles.
Contact writer Michael W. Pannell at mwpannell@gmail.com.