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September 8, 2009 WHO IS LITTLE RED THEATRE? We present children’s
theatre in Ontario and we live in Toronto Canada. We have doing so for 21
years now!! Yay!! In 1988 I was looking for a job. I didn’t want to go out and do the usual stuff like uh... get a waitressing gig. I was looking for something that I could do for awhile. After seeing that I was way too optomistic for an average theatre project with the adult in mind, I decided to look at my other options. In 1982 I took clown
classes with Richard Pochinko and I laughed a lot.
That when it hit me, you need to be doing stuff that is funny,
lighthearted and somewhat whimsical. My husband at the time thought Iwas
crazy for starting a theatre company when we actually needed money but I
entered the market when there was money floating around in school and
library boards so breaking into
the market wasn’t as difficult as it would be now.
I started with “The
Ugly Duckling”. My friend and
artistic colleague Sara Craig and I created our very own version, using
$500.00 of borrowed money from my brother.
We took a beautiful blue bedspread and cut holes in it for puppets.
We stood up the bedspread using mike stands.
I wrote my first script for kids and away we went to libraries and
schools.
Thinking about it from where I stand
now, it looks pretty crude but all the essentials of what I do now were
there. I have upgraded the
production values, learned to write better scripts and am more confident in
my ability to execute a workable show that will hold their attention for the
usual 45 minutes and even .... delight the teachers who need a break from
their crazy schedule of teaching.
I am proud of these
accomplishments. Recently I
organized little red’s 21st birthday and the most common thing
people said was, ‘wow, I can’t believe you have survived for so long”.
They say things like this because it is really hard to make a theatre
company last for a long time. My
secret is a lack of reliance on grants!!
Because I count on the revenues of the shows to be the lion’s share
of our earnings, I am able to budget according to enough ‘knowns’ to have a
reliable source of income.
Grants are a bonus!! Donations
are a bonus!! I love them,
please send them. Please give them!!
But.... no, my life and my breath and my theatre company don’t need
them to survive. You, my reader are my
customer.
Jody
Terio As you may have HEARD...........We are always dreaming up new plays! It was out of control for along time, but we're getting the hang of it. And YES!! We see about 50,000 kids every year and keep dreaming up new places to visit. This year we have carried our little red seed to about 236 schools in the course of the year offering the bounty to students from JK - 8. Our first show this year took the wonderful theme of Goldilocks and turned it into a musical. For this Danny Bakan and myself sat over Vietnamese coffee (who would have thought) and planned out an interesting approach to what amounts to... well not much of a story. We decided the Bears should be Canadian and then Danny wrote some wonderful fiddle music. And followng the release of Goldilocks and the three Canadian Bears in english, Genevieve Trilling translated it into French and we called it Boucle D’or et les Trois Ours Canadens. Following this adventure, we released The Ugly Duckling in March and in its 5th mount as a little red staple, it was once agin improved and looks awesome. (It’s still touring as we speak). We used three slide projectors to get the effect of being surrounded by the seasons and that made it all look real pretty. Running at the very same time is an show for older students based on the life of Emily Carr. It used the same slide projectors transporting us and her imagery into another dimension and is called Media 2 Art - The Story of Emily Carr. This show is new as we speak, we just started touring it in early April and we have about four more weeks left before the end of this touring season. IN November we will be returning with a whole new season of great and delicious shows - The Name of the Tree, Junk in the Attic - the musical and Aesop’s Fables. See our itinerary and our show page for details. We just can't stop ourselves from bringing imaginative theatre out to kids of all ages (that includes you by the way), transforming gymnasiums everywhere. Hope you see lots of VERY important children's theatre by the time we speak again. Jody Terio
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