Arts Activities Support

96% of the staff, performers, and audience members who were surveyed thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The leads were excellent and well-cast. You felt like they had popped out of the Disney movie onto the Cross Community Players stage. The quality of the singing, acting, dancing, and music provided the community entertainment that was enjoyed by all. Providing quality theater for the community was a need that was met with this project! The cast was good size filled with parents and their children working side by side as actors, musicians and back stage assistants. The audience loved the show! We continue to get feedback that this was one of our best shows. Due to construction in the high schools in the district, it was necessary to produce this show in one of the middle schools in the district. This provided us with no orchestra pit which is something we rely on for our summer productions. Fortunately, this specific show was orchestrated for a smaller group of musicians thus it was possible to incorporate the musicians within the stage set-up. At first, this appeared to be an incredibly difficult situation, but the artistic team was quite creative in placing the pit within the scenery. This placement ended up providing strong support for the actors on stage and was not a distraction for the audience members. There was a theft of money out of the purses that were stored in the ladies dressing room during tech week. In the future, we will make sure to provide secure storage of valuables during the rehearsal and production process. The perpetrators were caught and over 60% of the cash was returned and no other valuables were taken from the purses. Having done these shows for many years. The community we served was fairly accurately described in the grant application. Listed below are the ways we met our goals for making our project open and accessible. 50 free tickets were distributed to the food shelf recipients. Several community organizations took advantage of our group rates. A wide variety of ages attended the show. Two matinees, which were designed for convenience for families and for seniors not wanting to drive at night. Family involvement could be found in all aspects of the production. One performance was provided with ASL interpreters and Audio Describer. Our ASL and AD patrons were provided 2 tickets at a 50% discount. We utilized the extensive VSA Minnesota publicity network. We included the Wheelchair, ASL, Audio Description and Large Print accessibility symbols in our publicity. This year our venue had available Assistive Listening devices which we publicized in our mailings and publicity materials. We continue to work on ways of growing the attendance for our ASL/AD performances.