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The only dressing room was divided by a hanging blanket separating male and female performers.
#Florence little theatre events Patch
Well, anyway there was little else around the little building then and a small patch of woods was across the road. It is said that people who did not feel they could wait until intermission or the end of the show had an option of resorting to the outdoors. One of the favorite memories is that the restroom toilets could not be flushed during a performance because the noise could be heard all over the place. Many stories are told about the shortcomings of the airport theater, but it gave the group a chance to really develop. That sparked the momentum that really made FLT. It was far from ideal for live theater but now they could claim their own home.
#Florence little theatre events movie
Among the buildings they left behind was a small movie house that FLT obtained. The Florence Army Air Base which had been an Army Air Force training facility, was abandoned soon after the war. Officers elected were George Glass, Sylvia Stein and Mary King. An interested group got together, adopted bylaws and decided it was necessary for the Florence Little Theatre to have a permanent home and not have to search for a place to perform each show. That was the last shutdown, because in 1947, a couple of years after the war, the most serious effort at organization occurred. During that short revival period, the name was changed to Little Theatre Guild. The war effort took many young people away, making it more difficult for the theater to cast and organize crews. Some young people who had a taste for theater are credited with sparking a revival of the theater for a brief period from 1939 until U.S. One in the 1930s was the Great Depression which saw the theater inactive for a few years, and the other was World War II. (That house became the site of the Florence Museum for about 55 or 60 years.)īesides their vagrant status, these theater-minded people had determination and kept going despite a couple of times when world events turned out the lights. This was not in the script, but what one might call an ad lib. They put on a play beside the backyard pool, and according to some old timers, on closing night the cast threw the villain into the pool. Once was in the back yard of Sanborn Chase’s residence on Spruce Street.

Shows were put on outdoors, at least once in an abandoned garage behind a downtown hotel and in the Florence High School and old YMCA auditoriums. They performed in a lot of places around town over the years, overcoming the fact that most were not really suitable for theatrical productions. The Community Players soon became the Pinewood Players when that club offered its Five Points area building for productions, and they kept that name even after the club burned and the theater resumed wandering.

Surely they could not have dreamed what they would be 90 years later. In 1923 they called themselves the Community Players, and Margaret Wright was a key to forming the group that staged its first performance on the lawn of James M.

One might wonder what the people who turned out for the first performance of FLT’s predecessor in 1923 would think if they could see the theater’s work now. Performers were helped by real costuming and cosmetology areas, a fine rehearsal hall where they worked on the show for months and shops to develop sets and props.
#Florence little theatre events professional
They saw professional-looking lighting and amplification equipment and professional sets. The “Les Miz” audiences saw the show in the still-new $10 million theater building that FLT occupied in 2008. Everybody wanted the show, and this theater was the first S.C. The fact that the rights had been granted to the theater indicated the reputation FLT has earned over nearly a century. It possibly was the first time FLT had a show’s run sell out in advance, and there were disappointed people who were unable to get tickets for any of the nine performances.

When the celebrated musical “Les Miserables” opened at Florence Little Theatre September 2013, it was being performed for the first time by a community theater group in South Carolina.
