Our 5th annual marathon of live performances brought together over 2,000 people from all over our community to support Chance Theater’s artistic vision of bold, personal, and accessible theater. We are profoundly grateful to the over 150 participating artists (many who call the Chance their artistic home), 600 donors, and 250 fundraisers that donated their time, money and passion to this unique event. We came together as strangers, but left as family. Along the way we laughed, cried, shared heart-felt stories AND raised a whopping total of $34,031!!
There were so many highlights over the weekend, I will try my best to give a brief recap…
THE FIRST DAY
Chance-a-thon kicked off with three hours of youngsters singing and dancing. MyART Showcase and Young Star Showcase #1 and #2 gave us a glimpse of tomorrow’s theater stars. “Pianomen” (although there was a woman in the mix) featured Rob Blaney and friends rocking the joint with good ole classic rock-n-roll. Returning Chance-a-thon artist Rachel Mount sang her heart out to a mesmerized audience. An encore performance of the Veteran’s Initiative brought painful and personal diaries about the experiences of war to a captive audience. This amazing journey had an unexpected healing to all those in the room. “Voices in Harmony” had our very own resident artist and songbird, Jocelyn A. Brown and several of her peeps crooning tunes from a couple continents. Vocalist Rachel Oliveros Catalano took us on an affair of “Messy Love.” Catalano shared her distress of her youngest daughter’s recent 12-day hospital stay. To focus on the positive, she would visualize her performance this evening, knowing if she was there her little girl would be ok, too. Dear friend of the theater, Lisa C. Zaradich’s showcase “2 Girls and a Piano” was actually just one girl and a jazz pianist. A last minute adjustment and these pros jived the joint. Sarah Pierce, who has literally been performing at the Chance for half her life (she is a freshman at Chapman University), her younger sister Sammy Pierce and artist Jordan Goodsell, were triple threats of singing, dancing, and acting, all the while, poking fun at the girl’s mom Jody. It was F*^king hilarious! (Next time you see Jody ask her how her daughters ‘hear’ their mom!) Eleven hours later, day one concluded with a modern take on the bard with “Midsummer Lovers.” Resident Artists Karen O’Hanlon and James McHale, along with Ashley Arlene Nelson and Andrew Puente did Shakespeare proud!
WOW!! What a fabulous day.
THE SECOND DAY
Eleven productions on the Cripe Stage and four on the Fyda-Mar Stage. How awesome is that? But then again, you can’t be two places at one time. Dang it!!
I’ll start with the talent on the big stage:
A vampire was in the house bright and early Sunday morning (and it was extra early because Daylight Savings Time kicked in)! Hour one, an original play written by Travis Donnelly titled “An Evening with Robert S. Beauregard,” a thriller starring himself and buddy Alexander Walters. Spoiler alert: the creator of this mystery does not come out of the story alive! Ben Green shared musical tales about three generations of his family with an acoustic performance of “My Story… So Far.” A very surprised dad was called on stage to accompany his son with the closing song “Cats in the Cradle.” One of Chance Theater’s founding artists (and wonderful chanteuse) Erika C. Miller opened up with her emotional struggle with infertility. Unbelievably, she was able to hold it together while nearly the entire house felt her burden and shared her tears of sorrow. However, Erika closed the set by proudly displaying her baby bump that is currently carrying twins! We collectively cried tears of joy! Vocalist and piano player Robyn Manion brought us “An Acoustic Afternoon.” We watched as she went on a musical journey that followed her through a divorce to finding herself unexpectedly falling in love again. The next performance is something better experienced than watched — “Skins of Interaction: Unveil” from the ReborN Dance Interactive invited guests to walk through the dancers as they were performing the ballet. You watched literally from the inside out. “Cockeyed Optimist” featured the very talented Mitchell Turner taking the audience through his perceived career path, exploring the musical theater roles he gets cast in regularly, and the ones that he thinks he should be… and his voice killed all the tunes. “Peter Pan, a new musical” magically sprinkled its fairy dust on the young and the young-at-heart. My favorite part was seeing Peter Pan on a Hover board. HSMT Elite Performance Group gathered together a large group of very talented young artists to perform some of their “Broadway Favorites”. It was a double dose of awesome theater tunes from the Broadway Knights when they presented a two-hour concert, which made me want to see the musicals all over again. Our weekend event was capped off with the toe-tapping ragtime piano-playing of Eric Marchese and his “Ragtime for All Time.”
For the Fyda-Mar Stage’s inaugural appearance in the Chance-a-thon, we had four hours of very different entertainment…
“Sam & Molly” kicked things off with a two-person cabaret starring the very talented duo of Nohely Quiroz (seen recently at the Chance in Dogfight) and AJ Rafael. Nohely was back a couple hours later, along with four other cast members from last year’s Chance production of In The Heights, to present “It Won’t Be L-OANH-G Now.” The show, a lovable pun for our artistic director Oanh Nguyen, brought us in on the gossip about dating, roommates, and overcoming illness, with those closest to us, our familia of choice. “559” showcased the diverse skills of Carolina De La Torre, who simultaneously took the audience on a city tour and a tour of her talent in creating a range of unique characters. The music of Adele made its way into several sets of the marathon but it was the rewriting of the song “Hello” from Ashley Arlene Nelson and Miguel Cardenas that had us chuckling. “Ashley and Miguel’s Cabaret” was a love story but not between them! As the first song informed us — Miguel is gay and Ashley is apparently “a B*tch!!” (Not really, she just plays one on stage).
And that is a short recap of a weekend of live performances!!
The underlying theme of this spectacle was love. We simply cannot express our immense gratitude to our volunteers, board, fundraisers, donors, artists, audiences, and all the members of the community who contributed their time, money and talent to this event. None of this could have happened if it were not for YOU.
From the entire Chance Family, and with a full heart of LOVE we THANK YOU. We’ll see you all next year!!
— Susie Dittmar, Chance Theater Board Member
Some photos from 24hr Chance-a-thon 2016:
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