COLUMBUS, Georgia / Ledger-Enquirer.com / Life / May 6, 2011
By Sandra Okamoto
Lou Smith, the artistic director of the Vagabond Players, finds his actors in very different places. When auditions don’t bring the actors he needs, he’ll see someone in a store or in church and approach them.
Lou Smith, the artistic director of the Vagabond Players, finds his actors in very different places. When auditions don’t bring the actors he needs, he’ll see someone in a store or in church and approach them.
That happened to Amy Locke, who was playing saxophone in church. After the service, Smith asked if she’d be interested in acting.
“All my siblings have acted,” Locke said. “I’d always wanted to try it, but I never thought I’d get a chance.”
Maggie (Connie Kelly), Lydia (Susan Dolan) and Dora (Jean Morris)
are all talking at the same time while their new live-in nurse,
Jean Mitchell (Toni Ross), looks on in horror.
Now, she’s acting on the Scottish Rite Little Theater stage as Blue, who delivers groceries to “Those Crazy Ladies in the House on the Corner.”
Toni Ross was at PAWS Humane when she was talking to a friend about how she had done some acting. Smith overheard the conversation and asked if she would be in “Those Crazy Ladies.”
Actually, Smith was recruited to direct the show after the original director dropped out.
When he first read the first 13 pages of the play, he didn’t think it was very funny, and almost put the script down. But he kept reading and the lines got funnier and funnier, he said.
The play is about three elderly sisters, Maggie Brown (Connie Kelly), Lydia Van Horn (Susan Dolan) and Dora Miller (Jean Morris), who live together. Their doctor, played by Robyn Pate, decides that Jean Mitchell, a live-in nurse (Toni Ross) would be a welcome addition to the house.
The sisters tend to talk all at the same time, and Jean can hardly cope.
A mysterious woman, Jessie (played by Sandra Coffey), appears toward the end of the play and saves the day.
The women scare Blue, Locke said. “She’s scared to death of these women,” she said. “She’s scared of us because we all talk at the same time,” Morris said. “It’s a funny play. People will go out laughing.”
“Those Crazy Ladies in the House on the Corner.”
A comedy about three elderly sisters who have a live-in nurse move in with them. (Click here for more)
SANDRA OKAMOTO
E-Mail: sokamoto@ledger-enquirer.com
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