The  concert is entitled “A Dickens Of A Christmas” and all members will be dressed up in Dickensian costumes for the event.

The first venue is the BIlton Theatre (home of Bilton Amateur Dramatic Sociey, of which I am a long-standing member) which is situated between 17 and 19 Main Road, Bilton, Hull HU11 4AP. This is on Thursday December 17th commencing at 7.30pm. There is a car parking area at the theatre which is free to patrons. Tickets are priced at £5 for Adults, £4 for Concessions and £3 for Children. Please book your tickets in advance to ensure a seat, through Helen Davison on 01482 890997. The ticket price includes refreshments. This is the first time the society will have performed at the Bilton Theatre and it may be the first time some residents of Bilton visit the small but intimate theatre, which is usually reserved for the amdram society resident there!
The concert will include lots of festive songs and Carols from around the world,  including a lovely New Zealand Christmas Carol entitled “Te Harinui” which was written by Willow Macky. Other songs in the programme are “The Christmas Bells”, “I Saw Three Ships”, “Do You Hear What I Hear”, “Rocking”,  “The Coventry Carol”, “Still, Still, Still” (an Austrian Carol), “Sing A Christmas Carol” (which is featured in the musical show “Scrooge”), “O Holy Night”, “Mary’s Boy Child”, “The Holly And The Ivy” and “Jingle Bells”.

The second venue is the St James Church Hall in Church Street, Sutton. This is on Friday December 18th, same time and ticket prices. Tickets for this venue are to be booked through Diana Pringle on 01482 377192. The programme is the same as the concert in Bilton.

We are also due to be singing in a hospital annexe next Sunday afternoon so here’s hoping my voice holds up!

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Rehearsals are now stepping up for this show, as it is due to go on at the end of October, so only just over 4 weeks left to go now! Sunday rehearsals are in addition to the weekly Tuesday night rehearsals, and we are all in the process of having our costumes fitted. Last Sunday I tried mine on and loved it – I am one of the prostitutes in the show and my outfit is red (my favourite colour)with black lace. This weekend, Keith, my husband, will be taking photos of the principal characters ready for preparing the programme, which I will most likely be preparing over the next week or so.

Tickets have been printed and the posters for both venues are already out, some of which have been posted up across the region. Several hundred fliers have also been produced in order to maximise the publicity for this show.

On Thursday evening last week, a group of us from Hull Musical Society visited the Academy Theatre in Birdwell, Barnsley, to see their production of the show. It was very well produced with some outstanding performances from the principal characters. Their stage, in the Take 2 Centre, was about the same size as the stage at the Floral Hall in Hornsea where we will perform for the first two nights of our run. However, the company in Barnsley had about twice the number of people on stage as we will have, so we will probably be able to move around a bit more!

We are also planning our Christmas concert, which will take the form of a selection of songs rather than a show as such, and we are hoping to use 3 separate venues for this, including the theatre in Bilton where we stage the plays for Bilton Amateur Dramatic Society.

This new hobby of mine is proving more time-consuming than I first planned, but I am loving every minute of it and hope to be a member for a long time yet!

Tuesday was a day of mixed activities for me. I started the day early as I woke up with a stinking headache at 7am. I have been trying to avoid taking painkillers as I think I have been a bit too dependent on them for my headaches, but Tuesday morning was an exception. I did the usual morning routine of feeding the fish in the pond in the garden, which is when I tend to sit and relax for a while on the bench next to the pond – I love to stare at the fish as they effortlessly move for their food. Then it was cat-feeding time, followed by their daily grooming (I have two long-haired cats so they need regular brushing and de-tangling to reduce the amount of knots and hopefully the amount of fur-balls they inevitably throw up everywhere!!!!).  Then I spent some time doing a bit of painting on my 3rd in the series of abstract geometric designs for the gallery in Bridlington.  By 8.30am I was ready for some breakfast. After that I switched the PC on and made a start on locating various poems for the Junior/Youth section members as part of their entries for the Hornsea Speech & Drama Festival. This took longer than I anticipated, as ever, as I was still at it later that morning, 11am. In between painting I then spent the rest of the day finalising the design of the ticket and posters for the show. This was not as fruitful as I expected, but I managed to complete all by late afternoon. Then I was starting to feel hungry as I had forgotten to get any lunch. I rehearsed a couple of the songs ready for the rehearsal that night, and by 6.30 I left for a meeting with the Secretary prior to the rehearsal.

The rehearsal on Tuesday night was the first “Floor” rehearsal. It is a first for me, as I have never been in a musical show before, but it is very similar to the early rehearsal we have at Bilton Amateur Dramatic Society for our plays. We call the process “blocking the play” and essentially you need to have every move on stage written in your script to remember along with your lines.

I was cast as one of the girls in the “Pro” line (yes, a prostitute!) which actually quite pleased me since it means that I have a little bit more to do than I would have if I’d been a chorus member alone. We had a lot of fun flirting with the male characters in the scene, pretending to steal them away from their “wives” (maybe they’d spotted a talent in me based on my real life experience!) and generally be quite forward! A bit of “movement” was included in all three songs, not really any dancing as such, but it was all choreographed throughout. I found the whole evening was hard work, but lots of fun! The three songs we rehearsed were “Twice In Love Every Day”, which is the opening number, “I’m A Busy Man” (Barnardo’s solo piece) and “We’ll Get Him” . The next rehearsal for the chorus isn’t until a week next Sunday, as the children’s rehearsals are taking place next Tuesday.

I can’t wait, but in the meantime I am busy preparing publicity material for the show in order to ensure we get as much coverage as possible!