Open Call: City Theater Company faces 28th season 'a little stronger, a little smarter'

Oh if life were made of moments

Even now and then a bad one -

But if life were only moments,

Then you'd never know you had one.

—"Into the Woods,'' music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and a book by James Lapine

Like most artists, those of us at City Theater Company remember the moment when the world as we knew it shut down, back in March 2020. Our plans jettisoned, our season interrupted, our quest to bring art to vivid, inescapable, joyful life suddenly became lost

in the strange pandemic-era woods.

This moment, of course, stretched into a series of moments …. then a month ... then six months, 12 months, 16 months of moments.

As CTC looks back on the year-plus that was (and that we wish was not), it is these moments — the good, the bad, the indifferent — that we carry with us into a new time.

Like the ordinary people and fairytale monsters and supernatural beings of the quoted

"Into the Woods'' — one of our favorite Stephen Sondheim musicals — our people joined forces and met challenge after challenge to make our way through these woods.

From their respective dorm rooms and home offices and kitchen tables, to their backyards and local parks and city streets, our real-life actors and singers and musicians and playwrights and technicians and creators engaged with their time, their tears, and their talents to continue to create art with CTC in those so-called “unprecedented” times.

A series of music videos, celebrating some of our most triumphant moments, and a

program of interviews with CTC artists — first captured together while apart, and finally

performed on film in person as restrictions lifted and fears lessened — were integral to

our journey.

Fearless Improv, our comedy improvisation team, connected virtually to create moments

of comic gold together, bringing much-needed laughter to each other and to our

audiences when they, and we, could not be in a room making and enjoying art together.

We worked on new plays and revisited old favorites with local playwrights, wrestling with

rewrite and talkbacks, offering an opportunity for new players and familiar faces to work

side-by-side to create moments of connection with each other and with our patrons.

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As with our colleagues local and further afield, as similar stories in previous Open Call

columns have related, we found new ways to connect with our audiences.

And for a company that is defined by doing big theater in small spaces, by the living exchange of energies, ideas and experiences via the very breath of our people and our patrons, inhaled and exhaled in tandem, it was a particular challenge to find a way to be together alone throughout 2020-21.

Yet like the characters who went through Sondheim’s fictional scary woods, we have

come through the journey in our real scary woods a little stronger, a little smarter, a little

more eager to listen to each other, and a lot more prepared to know what we don’t know— together — for 2021-22.

Fearless Improv will be back with monthly, in-person shows around town, and get back

to work planning the Tax Free Comedy Festival — the only one of its kind in Delaware.

Now in its delayed third year (preempted in 2020) this festival brings the best

up-and-coming comedians and improv teams from across the country to Wilmington for

a weekend of workshops and performances.

CTC will present the musical "Once'' in December — a production we have been working to bring to the stage since that moment the world shut down a year and a half ago.

Featuring the hit “Falling Slowly” this beloved Tony award-winning show about a Guy, a

Girl, and a crew of unlikely friends who come together to make an album brings all the

wild joys and sorrows of creating and connecting through music to vivid, inescapable

life.

And we are still workshopping those plays we read online, and socially distanced

outside at people’s houses — looking to present them as fully realized staged premieres.

Richard Gaw’s "Rehoboth'' is a gripping portrayal of politics informing the personal, as a

marriage ends and old friends come to grips with their past in the present; and David

Robson’s "Blues In My Soul'' imagines the true tale of music phenom Lonnie Johnson’s

considerable — and oft-forgotten — influence on jazz, blues, and rock music with humor

and integrity.

We are out of the woods — eager to sally forth into our 28th season — and more than

ready to create new moments with each other and with you, while remembering the

many moments from this once-upon-a-time past that taught us not only who we are, but

who we can become through art, theater, laughter and song.

CTC is here for the ever after!

Kerry Kristine McElrone is artistic director of City Theater Company.