In the fall of 1994 some friends and I got together and put together a little sketch comedy show called SUDS. There were some skits, some improv bits and even a little music. I wrote the majority of the comedy sketches. The guy on the cover of the program, sitting in the tub, is Bosko - a very old pre-Bugs Bunny Warner Bros. cartoon character. He had nothing to do with the show but we thought he looked good on the cover of our program.
Two years later, I had grown tired of auditioning for shows and always being offered tiny little parts. I was taking a Theatre Writing class at the time and decided that my final project of a One Act play was good enough to turn into a feature length play. So I gathered together some of the same people that worked on SUDS, we established ourselves as a theatre company..Down South Theatre Company to be exact, and we put on a show. A full fledged two hour plus play called Barn of Thought, which was also based on a column I wrote in our school newspaper. The show was about growing up and moving on from college and it incorporated many of the subjects that I had touched upon in my newspaper column. The show was a success.
For our follow up to Barn of Thought I wrote Brothers & Sisters, a comedy with several different storylines that involved all the siblings of a large family. We held auditions and rehearsals were a few days away when I decided that I didn't like the script at all. It wasn't very exciting. So I stayed up all night before the first day of rehearsals and morphed Brothers & Sisters into Cupid's Arrow. Cupid is really just a collection of skits with a slight framework around it. Several of the scenes from Brothers & Sisters ended up just becoming sketches in the new show. The artwork for the poster and program was done by good friend Grant. It's the only time we used original artwork instead of just clip art.
Even though Barn of Thought was probably a better written show, the production I'm most proud of is Sunburned. The scope of the production was bigger than anything we had done before. It was a musical, which meant singing...and dancing. We ended up having a live in-house band perform the music live each night. The show consisted of three original songs and five summertime classics. The script was nothing more than a modern version of an old Frankie and Annette beach picture but as the production rolled on through the month of July 1997, our audiences got bigger and bigger with each show.
The final stage production under the Down South name was 1998's Passport To Hawaii. A very silly show with plenty of stock characters, cliche' storylines and slapstick humor throughout. Although the show wasn't a musical, it did have four musical numbers and again some live music to add to the festivities. The original posters and programs were printed on a light green paper, but for some reason all I have is this master copy of the artwork.
After four theatre productions in a row, we moved our attentions to film and attempted to make the first Down South movie. In the summer of 1998 we spent 10 long hot days shooting "Bikini Academy" which was plagued with production problems right from the start. The movie features performances from many of the actors that we had worked with in our stage productions. Sadly, in the end, Bikini Academy did not turn out to be like anything we had hoped it would be. We had one (kind of sad) screening for the cast and crew and then dumped the film onto public access cable where it aired in two parts for a few years. At that point, myself and a few others involved turned our attentions to a cable access comedy show we had started and left the theatre behind us.
You can read more about Barn of Thought and Cupid's Arrow in past posts.
