Dramatic Publishing

Where There's a Will, There's a Way

Once upon a time, many years ago, my home-town recreation department decided to start a community theatre program. They asked me and another gentleman to be the founding directors. We were young, and so we agreed.

The first thing we discovered was that, though there had been money budgeted for our (meager) salaries, there had been no money budgeted for nonessential items like costumes, sets, advertising or royalties. When I went to my boss in city hall and asked that this be rectified, she looked at me blankly and said, "You mean that stuff costs money?"

Fortunately, we had connections with several other theatres in the area, and so we could borrow costumes and props. We were given discarded flats and lumber. The newspapers and television stations gave us free publicity with a minimum of begging.

Our most unanticipated problem came when we couldn't make city hall understand the concept of "royalties." It amazed them that they were expected to pay for the rights to scripts. "We're giving their play exposure," they complained. Why should we give them money, too?" Gosh, how do you answer that?

Since we had no money for royalties that first season, I wrote several plays myself--customized for the set pieces and costume elements we had at hand. (Mercifully, none of these scripts have survived.) We dug out plays that had fallen into the public domain and rewrote them for our own purposes.

We saved everything we built. For one production we had managed to build a front-porch facade, two trees, a park bench, and a street lamp. We were so pleased with ourselves! Imagine how these could be combined and recombined for other plays! We had a Friday night opening and a Saturday matinee at a local school, with big audiences.

When we returned on Monday, our set pieces were gone. We looked everywhere and finally went to the janitor. "Oh," he said with a happy grin. "I knew you were done with that stuff, so I burned it all for ya." So much for stock pieces.

We believed that there was a need for good children's theatre in the community, and so we badgered the recreation department until they promised to pay royalties for our first show of the second season. If we had respectable houses, they said, they would consider bankrolling the rest of the season. It would be a good idea, we decided, to choose the first show wisely. We selected Winnie-the-Pooh, the Sergel script [adapted by Kristen Sergel]. The recreation department bought a tiny two-inch by two-inch newspaper ad to let the community know that we were doing a weekend production in a local church recreation hall.

That weekend 1,200 children and their parents converged on our little theatre. We extended the run for a second weekend with the same result, and never heard another complaint from city hall about paying royalties.

I have been a Winnie-the-Pooh fan ever since.

Philip Grecian began his show business career by hiring out as a ventriloquist and magician at the age of four. By 15 he had written a three-act comedy which was produced at a local theater. At the age of 16 he was founding director for a city-funded community theater. Two years later he was asked, without audition, to be a part of the Creede Colorado Repertory Theatre, where he spent a season acting and writing. He continues to maintain a connection with Creede Repertory, where his plays have been produced and where he has returned as a guest performer. After touring the Midwest as Androcles in Androcles and the Lion, he returned to the community theater he had founded, remaining there as artistic/managing director and resident playwright for six years; he resigned in 1976 in order to create a professional dinner theater where he served as producer and artistic director. After establishing a strong financial base for the new theater, he left to work as a writer/director in film, video and audio production. In 1994, Grecian became the founding director/playwright for a theater company which mounts an annual production of his adaptation of In His Steps, based upon Charles Sheldon's best-selling 19th-century novel. His adaptation of A Christmas Carol has become an annual tradition in many communities around the United States, and his radio dramatization of Dracula!, based on his stage play, and syndicated for a time on radio stations across the country, has come full circle and is now a staged radio production, complete with an onstage sound effects crew. It is the first of several staged radio dramas he has written. Other plays include his widely popular The Velveteen Rabbit and the official stage adaptation of the motion picture A Christmas Story ("You'll shoot your eye out"), which is produced annually by scores of professional, educational and community theater companies throughout the English-speaking world. His plays The Dragon of Nitt and Lion and the Lyre have been translated and performed in Russia.