By Brian Argabright
830 Times
The show must go on … even if it takes a year off due to a pandemic.
Friday night marks the return of live theater to Del Rio as the Upstagers present “First Night” at the Paul Poag Theatre for the Performing Arts. Show starts at 8 p.m. The two-person show will run Friday and Saturday and then again June 18 and 19.
Advanced tickets can be purchased at Paulino’s Service Center, Diamond’s Salon, Del Rio Feed & Supply, Mesquite Creek Outfitters and Crossfit Del Rio. Tickets are $14 for adults, $10 for students ages 18 and under. Advanced tickets can only be purchased with cash or check.
This show has had quite the history with the Upstagers. This will be the second time it will be performed by the award-winning theater group. Former star Kellie Jackson is now directing the performances.
The show’s premise is simple. It’s a romantic comedy about two people that were in love in high school and then life took them in a different direction. This is their first night together after several years apart.
But just getting the show to this point was a challenge thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“With this particular show, we had actually cast this show and was two weeks from curtain last year when the shutdown happened,” Scott Fooshee, vice president of the Upstagers Board of Directors, said. “We continued rehearsing, since it’s only a two-person show, until it became very evident that we would have to cancel the season.”
As it turned out, 2020 became a lost season for the Upstagers. All of its shows were canceled and changes wound up being made to the cast of “First Night” due to circumstances beyond the group’s control.
“We stayed in contact with Kellie Jackson and the cast was still on board until November when decided to come back in 2021 and ‘First Night’ would be the first show,” Fooshee said. “So in January 2021, we were getting ready to start rehearsing again. Then we learned one of actors had moved, and the other actor’s schedule changed to the point they couldn’t be in the show anymore. We planned to have auditions just for the male part, but now we had to recast the entire show. The only thing lasted from the previous season was the director and the set.”
This year’s run of “First Night” will feature Christopher Wofford as the male lead and Alex Sanchez as the female lead. Wofford appeared in the Upstagers’ productions of “Mamma Mia” and “Things My Mother Taught Me” while Sanchez worked backstage on “Mamma Mia” but did theater while at Del Rio High School including as the lead in “West Side Story.”
Wofford was already connected to “First Night” even before he auditioned. He was set to be the assistant director before it was postponed.
Fooshee explained that the smaller cast was perfect for 2020, and it turned out to be the right call to kick things off in 2021. He said the loss of many of the Upstagers’ regular performers, due to moving out of town or a change in work schedules, made casting larger casts a little difficult. Even the auditions for “First Night” were difficult due to a lack of male performers who attended the initial audition. Wofford was at the second audition.
“There was a lot of nervous anticipation at the first auditions. We’ve all been through a lot – everyone wearing masks, social distancing, a lot of nervous anxiety about even going to be able to do a show with social distancing and the pandemic itself. A lot of us just want to get back to doing musicals,” Fooshee said. “This first production is going to be something of a test run. We’re going to test some things out, test the waters.”
While the specter of the pandemic continues to hang over the world, the rise in vaccinations have helped see an increase in businesses reopening, people reuniting and other daily activities that seemed almost forbidden since March 2020. Even the initial advertising for “First Night” informed the public that mask regulations would still apply, but only to those patrons who are not fully vaccinated. In addition, 2020 season tickets would be honored.
This is just the start for a full return to the stage for the Upstagers. “Songs of a New World” is slated to run in August while the romantic musical “First Date” will close out the season in November.
“This is a season of renewal for us, and I hope we actually get to have it,” Fooshee said.
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