After six shows hit the Cultural Arts Theatre stage over the past six months, it’s time to bid farewell to the 2012-2013 Cultural Arts Theatre Series season.
“Overall it was a great success,” said Lorraine Robinson, a committee member with the CATS board.
Every year, the CATS board tries to bring in a variety of acts to entertain and enlighten the Westlock audience, and this year was no exception.
This season, the acts who performed in town were blues guitarist Matt Anderson, Celtic singer John McDermott, Julia Mackey’s one-woman show Jake’s Gift, harpist Keri Lynn Zwicker and fiddler Lizzy Hoyt, Celtic-folk trio Tillers Folly and dance troupe Motus O Dance.
“Our patrons really appreciate the variety that we bring in,” Robinson said. “Here they get exposed to it and they might find they really do enjoy a new genre that they might not have taken the effort to go find.”
Each show ended up being what could be termed “sold out,” she said, explaining that means more tickets were sold than there are actual seats in the theatre.
However, she said she doesn’t like using the term “sold out,” because that makes it sound like once all 246 seats are filled, no one else can get in.
If someone wanted to take in one of the “sold out” shows, Robinson said she and her colleagues would do what it took, even if it meant setting up chairs in the balcony along the sides of the theatre.
When that did happen, she said there were some ground rules.
“We make it really clear that, ‘I’m sorry, but this is where you’ll be sitting,’ and they don’t care,” she said. “They just want to be in the theatre with these performers.”
Bringing a variety of acts to Westlock takes a lot of work, Robinson said, if only because there’s the desire to have something new while attempting to appeal to everyone’s tastes.
“It’s kind of an interesting job, in a sense, trying to figure out what our audience likes,” she said. “We like to have at least one that’s a little bit ‘stretchy,’ you know, that maybe pushes the audience out of what they’re used to seeing so they get to experience something new.”
That goal of bringing something new to the community will be borne out in the upcoming 2013-2014 CATS season.
On tap for next year are five musical acts and one physical comedian, Robinson said.
Season ticket holders have until June 1 to renew their tickets before they go on sale to the general public.
