Paul Szmal: And FLX Morning continues at 7.53, it's 63, and I have a studio full of guests here to talk about the Between the Lakes Community Service Players and a special production that they have coming up to benefit the Ovid Fire Department. Normally, Abe Bauter is here as Cornell Cooperative Extension, but today you get to be on the thespian side of things, sir. That's right, Brother Nigel coming up in something right. Okay, and who else do we have here in studio with us? You have Tina Bauter. Okay. I'm the director of the production. Okay. And I'm Chamberlain Bauter. I'm playing Nigel Bottom, the little brother of the lead character. Oh, so it's a full family affairs part of this deal then.
Tina Water, Dave Water, Chamberlain Water: It certainly is. I drag them along with me because everybody else is pretty tired when we rehearse.
Paul Szmal: I can imagine, yeah.
So how did you come about selecting Something Rotten as the play to perform and the musical to perform, shall we say?
Tina Water, Dave Water, Chamberlain Water: Well, I saw the show in 2015 on Broadway. It is hysterical. I knew it then that it was, you know, a show I'd love to do when it was available. And this summer, you know, we were looking, well before the summer, we were looking for a production that would be light, fun, just something the actors and the community would just love. Something different, too.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, and something humorous in light of the situation that the people have been dealing with in Ovid, sometimes laughter is the best medicine.
Tina Water, Dave Water, Chamberlain Water: Absolutely. One hundred percent. That's what we're going for and that's what this show does, for sure.
Abe, tell me about the character that you play. So I play Brother Jeremiah. The premise of the show is that there's two struggling playwrights in Elizabethan England and the problem is that Shakespeare sucks in all the oxygen. He's got the reputation and everything else, and so they're trying to figure out how they can best Shakespeare, how they can be successful. So they go to a soothsayer who happens to be Nostradamus, but it's Thomas Nostradamus, the Nostradamus's nephew. And so he isn't quite there, but what Nostradamus comes up with is that the next big thing is going to be musicals. And so he sees into the future and gets bits and pieces of musicals that the Bottom Brothers end up putting together. But, however, in Elizabethan England you have the Puritans, and I play the chief Puritan who thinks that theaters are awful, sinful places and I'm trying to shut them all down.
Paul Szmal: Okay. Chamberlain, tell me about the part that you're playing in this show.
Tina Water, Dave Water, Chamberlain Water: So Nigel Bottom is actually a really interesting character in this show. So he writes everything for his older brother who's kind of the ideas guy versus the little brother who's the writer. And the other thing that's really awesome about Nigel's character is over the course of this show you realize how much of Shakespeare's stuff maybe wasn't written by Shakespeare. Obviously that's a really big thing in the world of conspiracy theories is wondering how much of William Shakespeare's work was actually written by him versus under a different name. And Nigel is kind of the face of that in the sense that to be or not to be, there's many different lines that Nigel writes in this show that Shakespeare takes his book looking for some ideas and ends up writing in his own way. And this is all in a musical context.
Paul Szmal: Absolutely.
Tina Water, Dave Water, Chamberlain Water: 100% musical. It spoofs musicals and it's just such, there's so much going on in the show. There's a number that basically called a musical when it's introduced by Thomas Nostradamus, this idea that there's at least 30 different musicals, well-known musicals that have pieces in the song.
Paul Szmal: Oh wow.
Tina Water, Dave Water, Chamberlain Water: And it's just, it's crazy.
How big is the cast for this?
Paul Szmal: We have a cast of 27.
Tina Water, Dave Water, Chamberlain Water: Wow.
Paul Szmal: Okay. It's a great, it's a great size cast, lots of talented folks and we're having fun.
Well let's get to the important stuff here. When are the performances and how do people get tickets to it?
Tina Water, Dave Water, Chamberlain Water: So performance opens this Thursday, the 24th of July. So it's Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Each of the three performances are at 7.30 PM at the South Seneca High School Auditorium, which is air conditioned and we want to point that out because that's not always the case in summer theater. And you can get tickets, you can go through our Facebook page, Between the Lakes Community Service Players, there's a QR code and a webpage there to order tickets or you can get them at the door.
Paul Szmal: How many months worth of rehearsals have you gone through to put this thing together?
Tina Water, Dave Water, Chamberlain Water: Well we started, we auditioned in May, sort of the third week in May, but before that a lot of us that are on the production team were already working on it. So I mean from our first rehearsal till now, I'd say definitely right before Memorial Day was our first rehearsal and now we're here. That's not a lot of time to put a musical together, that's kind of crunching it a little bit.
Paul Szmal: It is crunching it a little bit.
Tina Water, Dave Water, Chamberlain Water: And a lot of people who are involved in this production on all levels are also, we're working full time, a lot of them work at schools, not everybody, but that's the end of a school year kind of makes it a little tricky as things are kind of wrapping up and you're competing for use of space. South Seneca High School is very, very wonderful, gracious folks who have allowed us to make our home there in their auditorium and it's just a labor of love. And again, the performance is called Something Rotten, it benefits the Ovid Fire Department so you're enjoying yourself for a good cause. It's July 24th, 25th, 26th, that's this Thursday, Friday and Saturday, 7.30pm performances at the South Seneca High School Auditorium on Main Street in Ovid.
Paul Szmal: Yes, it's air conditioned. We'll make sure we mention that again because it's supposed to get muggy by the end of the week. Tickets are $12 general admission, $10 for students, seniors. There are tickets available at the door, but you can also go through the Between the Lakes Community Service Players Facebook page to get your tickets in advance.
To the Bonner Clan, thank you so much and break a leg on the performance.
Tina Water, Dave Water, Chamberlain Water: Thank you very much.
Paul Szmal: All right, and it is 7.59 on FLX Morning on Finger Lakes Newsradio. I'll have a local news update coming up after the CBS World News Roundup as FLX Morning continues.
