Yesterday I went to the Summer Solstice Faerie Festival at Marshy Point Nature Center in Maryland. It was delightful, a lot of fun, and had so much going on. The setting was perfect! It was a rush to see so many people into Cosplay.
So on the way down there, I was thinking about GnomeFest. I realized that it needs to take place in close proximity to New Hope and it needs to take place in conjunction with the Premiere of the stage show.
Nothing has been discussed yet regarding using The Bucks County Playhouse as the venue for the Premiere, so if that doesn't come into play, we will need to build our parade float as a mobile stage, from which we can present versions of the show in a festival environment.
The subject of presenting The Gnomes of New Hope at Faerie Festivals, of which there are a few, came up. I know there are other outdoor venues where a show can be presented as well.
Which leads me to think about the kind of show that needs to be presented in that fashion. Clearly the whole Musical Theatre piece cannot be presented at a fair. At most, the environment can tolerate a 20 minute show. Even if we broke the show into a few 20 minute segments and presented them over the course of the day, at best we could squeeze in four shows. The Full Musical runs 3 hours. Of course I have numerous versions, to fit different time slots and circumstances, including the parade. So I need to give that more thought. I need to finish with the publication work on the book series before we can really get down to it. I can say that building the mobile stage us going to be a priority, before we even begin planning presenting the show.
I can say that most of the forest folk at the Faerie Fest I spoke to about the Gnomes were, on the whole, very excited. A lot of excellent ideas and suggestions we're exchanged. A bunch of people said "you've got to talk to the Gnomes" well, we caught up with them and had a lengthy and excited conversation with a Gnome couple from Reading PA. After we left them we had an epiphany about presenting the Story-telling sessions. Maybe that should be combined with the stage presentation? In fact, in that context, we don't even need a stage!
Mostly, I suggested to folks that they keep watch here and follow what is going on and, of course, stay in touch via email.
So it seems that the GnomeFest scenario needs to be at least as important as the parade and the stage show. That's a lot of producing that needs to be done. It's a good thing I have many years of experience doing just that. It's amazing how little by little we end up in our destiny. AG
