NEWS
An Enchanting Boos & Brews Moved to the Davidson Community Players’ Armour Street Theatre
Boo! The Armour Street Theatre became a haunted house last weekend. Eerie skeletons floated over the entryway of Davidson Community Players (DCP) artistic home. There, brave theatrical patrons willing to be frightened—more likely, entertained—sidestepped spinning spider webs clinging to the walls at the company’s seventh annual Boos & Brews Halloween production.
Six ten-minute plays by North Carolina playwrights were selected from the forty submissions DCP received this year. The clever vignettes were staged for the first time at the Armour Street Theatre instead of the Main Street Actors Lab where they have been produced in the past. Great change! The theatre stage allowed for improved set designs and back-up visuals portrayed on a screen.
Once again, a delightful Mistress of Ceremonies, Debra Allebach, endeared the audience with her series of holiday quips and personal clips. Performers generally were non-traditional actors.
A family of spiders, Skylar Schock, Delisha Latham and Steve Kaliski, delivered insect crunching documentaries in Marshall Cesena’s Almond Blood, when the daughter attempted to become vegan.
Spencer Hawkins as Captain Halloween and John Pace as Little Squash in “Captain Halloween”
A pair of unlikely caped crusaders, Spencer Hawkins and John Pace as Little Squash, delivered Andy Rassler’s Captain Halloween tale about their unfortunate ladies played by Charlotte Rogers and Kara Barnette.
When two couples got together, the man from one couple and a woman from the other realized they really were a morgue attendant zombie and a vampire nurse in Two of a Kind, written by Lynn Fesenmeyer-Johnson and starring Timo Nicolakis, Jamie Rogers, John McIlhattan, and Nicole Cunningham. Bad blood!
Friends on tour of a haunted house in Rishi Chowdhary’s Kindred Spirits were former humans sharing experiences with an amazing finale! Featured were Aaron Zimmerman, Denise McKercher, Carlos Rios, Laura Odomirok, and Karen Lico.
Change of Heart by Cale Evans starred Edwin Quiterio as a widowed father and Timo Nicolakis as the son with a heart transplant, who wondered whether it came from a gorilla or another amazing donor.
Distraught vampire parents, Dave Gilpin and Christine Hull, in Mark Ariail’s Curfew asked their son, played by Drew Colven, who’s attempting to leave home and live with a non-vampire friend, to bring her over for dinner. Who needs to cook?
As usual, Boos & Brews set the tone for an enchanting, scary Halloween. Be sure to watch for it next year.
Connie Fisher
Connie Fisher, neé Consuelo Carmona, is a Davidson resident who grew up in Mexico City where she became a journalist and acquired a taste for the theatre. Her preference for work behind the scenes led to an interest in writing reviews—Yale Rep among her favorite troupes. Connie is the author of Doing it the Right Way, the biography of an Italian hatmaker. Her prose appears with 87 other international writers in The Widows’ Handbook. An active, founding member of Lake Norman Writers, Connie just released her latest book, "The Mongrel, Bi-cultural Adventures of a Latina-Scandinavian Youth," a memoir about her years growing up in Mexico.