By Nathanael Fisher, ECTC Producing Artistic Director/CoFounder
Last year, Season 11 ended with a beautiful and magical show – Mary Poppins. Hillary Marshall Anthony and Vincent Pelligrino, along with 20 other cast members and a spectacular creative team co-created a wealth of magical, heartwarming and inspirational moments on our stage for you, our Emerald Coast Theatre Company community. My favorite moment of the show was during Act II when every cast member took the stage and the full company sang with full hearts “Anything Can Happen.” Here are just a few of the impactful lyrics:
If you reach for the stars
All you get are the stars.
But we’ve found a whole new spin!
If you reach for the heavens
You get the stars thrown in –
Anything can happen if you let it!
While we were in tech rehearsals for Mary Poppins, I asked the cast to put themselves and their dreams into the number as they sang, and to really imagine and believe that anything could happen for them—and we would believe right along with them. This idea of dreams coming true is personal for me. If you read my article in last year’s program, you learned about “How ECTC Came to Be” (you can find this article on our website under “Theatre Thoughts”). As I consider the history of ECTC since its beginning in October of 2012, it is clear to us…Anything CAN Happen.
We launched our first program in January of 2013 with an after-school theatre class of 10 students at Destin Elementary School. The following summer we produced a theatre camp at Destin Elementary with 30 students in a non-musical production of Aladdin. Anna had our 6-month old daughter, Zoe, as well as our 6-year-old twins, Mia and Bella, in tow as she gathered props and designed costumes for 30 students! Ora Wolfgram, a bright eyed 11-year-old girl, played Aladdin’s cat. The playwright took liberties in creating many roles for kids — hence Aladdin had a cat. Her only text was “meow,” and she delivered that meow with so much subtext each time that the audience knew exactly what that cat was saying. Ora is a professional artist now, and in a beautiful twist of fate, she is serving as ECTC’s resident Props Artisan and Stage Manager. We were blown away at the time that our 10 students had grown to 30 (and a cat)…anything can happen!
Summer of 2013, we launched the Family Theatre programs at HarborWalk Village and the Village of Baytowne Wharf. I wrote energetic, three-actor plays, with engaging audience interaction for these sites. I pitched Jamie Hall, Marketing Director for Harborwalk Village at the time, the idea of a Family Theatre show, and she said, “I’ll pay you for two performances, and provide tech support. If I like it, I’ll book you for the summer.” After watching more than 100 people engage in “Pirate Pete and the Case of the Missing Fisherman” while dancing, laughing and having a great time, I asked her, “Well, what’s the schedule? Your audience loved that show!” We were booked with our first gig.
While getting to know this community again (Anna grew up here), we were aware of the wonderful work that StageCrafters was doing in Fort Walton Beach, the great programming at Seaside REP, and the strong theater presence in Bay County with The Martin and Kaleidoscope Theaters. With the growth of the Destin, Miramar Beach and Santa Rosa Beach communities, it seemed like there was an opportunity to complement the theatre scene with professional theatre programming in Destin and Miramar Beach. So, in summer of 2014, Anna and I again started knocking on doors. Who had an empty retail space or event space that would allow us to produce a show? A Dickens Christmas is a three-actor adaptation of A Christmas Carol that I wrote to help launch our professional theatre, and HarborWalk Village and Sandestin both blessed us with event spaces for that inaugural production. 367 people attended the performances of that show and ECTC’s productions for adults and families were launched…anything can happen!
During the first three years of the organization, we stored all the props and costumes we acquired in our garage, the carport was used as the scene and paint shop, and our Chevy Traverse was the work van. We had plastic bins and foldable dollies. One of my most vivid memories is dropping Anna off to teach a class with Miss Darla while I took care of our 8-year-old twins and two-year-old baby. There they were walking down the sidewalk in 90° weather, dolly and bins in tow with a full heart and determination to teach theatre to their students. In the summer of 2015, Stacey Brady, Marketing Director at Grand Boulevard, hired ECTC to produce a 45-minute adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream for Theatre Thursdays in the Grand Park. The following year, Stacey and her team were gracious enough to let us use the space that is now Williams Sonoma for some additional professional theatre shows and kids classes. These were humble beginnings for sure, but Anna and I were already seeing the benefits for kids and patrons. The long days, hard work and lugging all the “stuff” around was so worth it when we heard how people’s lives were changing for the better.
In addition to producing shows and camps, I was working as an adjunct professor at UWF in Pensacola as well as at Gulf Coast State College in Panama City. During this time, as I drove from one end of Highway 98 to the other and worked on productions in between, I just kept looking for empty spaces. The prayer in my heart was to have a home for ECTC. One day while driving by Grand Boulevard it hit me: every building had second floors that had offices built out, but the 560 building looked empty. Every time I drove by, I considered the idea, ‘What if that was a space for us?’ We already had a great relationship with Grand Boulevard; what were the possibilities? One night while driving by with Anna, I pointed to it. “Anna, see that building? See how it’s dark, and how every other building on the second floor has lights but that one?” She nodded with a small smile of understanding. “They haven’t built out that space yet and I really feel like we are going to be there one day.” “How do you know?” she asked. “I just have a feeling; I’m not saying it’s a word from God or anything, I just have this really strong feeling we are going to be there one day.“
In August of 2016, I got the call from Stacey Brady. “Hey Nathanael, can you and Anna meet me at the 560 Building at Grand Boulevard?” We walked upstairs into the empty, echoey expanse and she said, “Well, it’s 17,600 square feet. Think you can use it?” “Yes!” Anna and I exclaimed as we burst into happy tears. As I recount this story, I can’t help but think of some of the lyrics referenced earlier: If you reach for the heavens, you get the stars thrown in — ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN!
When we moved into 560 Grand Boulevard, I was still paid part time with ECTC while volunteering full time. Anna was hired as an independent contractor per teaching or costuming gig and volunteering the rest of the time as well when she wasn’t at her regular job teaching 4th grade. With a grant from the St. Joe Community Foundation, we bought curtains and tracking to divide off the performance space. A grant from the Cultural Arts Alliance of Walton County covered additional theater lighting, and with some amazing volunteer help from friends at University of West Florida – Glenn Breed and Phillip Brulotte – we moved in and prepared to open Constellations, our first show in the new space.
Because audience members need a place to sit, we filled this need with donated white folding chairs. Monica Bowes owned an event company and offered her event chairs whenever I wanted as long as I was able to come get them myself and they weren’t in use for an event. By this time, my Father in Law, Jerry Ogle, had donated an old Ford truck to ECTC. So, every time we did a show at the Market Shops, the Williams Sonoma space at Grand Boulevard, and even the first couple of shows at 560 Grand Boulevard, off I would go in the old Ford to pick up one to 200 foldable white event chairs, and, of course, to return them the day after the production run ended. Soon after moving into 560 Grand Boulevard, with generous donations from Eric and Teresa Bolton and Doug and Jan Best, we were able to purchase our soft, cushy, black chairs and some sound equipment! For a time, these chairs set in rows on ground level worked. But, one day we had a few hundred children at a Field Trip production of Flat Stanley the Musical, and the kids on the back two to three rows were sitting on their knees and standing up. They simply could not see, because all of our nice cushioned chairs were ground level. Unfortunately, we did not get the grant funding we were hoping for to purchase risers. Later that week, I was having lunch with Shirley Simpson and we were discussing how unfortunate it was that we didn’t get the grant money. Mrs. Simpson asked me, “Well, how much do you need for the risers?” I replied with the amount. She returned with, “You’ve got it!” WHAT?!!! To this day, Shirley and I recount this story, her joy in being able to have such a positive impact on ECTC and my overwhelmed reaction at her news. If you know me, then you know that I responded with some breathless wonder and a few tears – truly, anything CAN happen!
Since 2016, the partnership with Grand Boulevard for the space has been a dream come true. Our first season there, Season 4 (2016-2017), we produced two to three actor shows and no musicals: Constellations, A Dickens Christmas and Bakersfield Mist. We had a little over 1,800 people attend those three productions, 1,745 people attended our educational program performances, and we had about 470 education program registrations. I had just become full time with the company, but still supplemented by continuing to adjunct at Gulf Coast State College and UWF, Anna was still hired as needed as an independent contractor and volunteered the rest of the time, and our team was filled out with some amazing independent contractors like Bridgett Bryant, Darla Briganti, Cana Strong and others.
Fast forward to the end of Season 11 and looking forward to Season 12 – we are now producing shows with casts of up to 22 actors; we had over 13,000 people attend Season 11 professional and Family Theatre productions, over 3,100 people attend the educational theatre productions, and 769 registration in our educational theatre programs including the satellite programs in DeFuniak Springs, Freeport and Panama City. Our team has grown to eight, full-time employees, including Anna and I, and one part-time employee. And, we’re looking forward to another season of spectacular professional and educational theatre with the goal of serving our community with excellence! ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN!
While we were celebrating our 10-year anniversary, we were being interviewed by Zandra Wolfgram for an article in a local magazine. She asked Anna and I, “So, Year 10! Is it ‘Mission Accomplished’?” Anna and I looked at each other and laughed – “Mission just getting started! We are not done dreaming!” We still feel that way. Look at the last 11 years, look what’s happened, look how YOU our community has embraced us. We are so incredibly grateful for everything that has happened, but with YOUR help there is more. Will you dream with us, will you believe with us that even still…ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN!?!?
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