DINNER THEATRE at HILLCREST from 2007 to ....
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Please contact the church office if you can provide photos or videos of any of Hillcrest's Dinner Theatre Events.
All Hillcrest dinner theatres over the years have included a three course dinner. So many folks have volunteered onstage and off, cooking in the kitchen, serving food and cleaning up. Two people who have helped at these major undertakings (as well as many other fund raising dinners!) are Janet Inglis and Gregg Wishart. Hillcrest is so grateful for its many kind friends.
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Hillcrest Dinner Theatre
started in 2007, during the time of Rev. Scott Hillier. Scott's wife Wendy took charge of organizing the meals for these terrific fund raisers. The cast would serve the meals 'in character'. Alicia Doiron, a member of the Hillcrest Choir, directed the first two plays: The Moos Brothers of Dry Gulch and Buffalo Skunk Lodge of Montague. They were written by Alicia's father, a farmer in Northern Ontario, who supposedly dreamed up his plays while out plowing! |
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The Hillcrest Players got the theatre bug again in 2015 when we presented Turn Your Radio On!, dinner theatre with a twist. This blast from the past transported audiences back to the 1930s & ‘40s with music, period skits and ads, ending with a “live” episode of that radio drama classic The Green Hornet. Cast members (and sisters) Anne White and Sandra MacDonald found a skit called Silence, Please! published in 1928 that their mother Fran Shaw had performed in locally in the early ‘30s. This one act also starred Elizabeth and Thane LeLacheur.
Director Melissa Mullen created a Montague style Green Hornet script in which publisher Britt MacReid of the Eastern Graphical, along with his side kick Kato, unmasked the dastardly villain vandalizing the beloved Art Works on Main. While actors performed the drama on microphone, our foley team Rob MacLean and David White produced both recorded and live sound effects with the help of some unusual gadgets. Liz Nimmo also sang a beautiful song to her husband Jim: All the Things You Are. |
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Please contact the church office if you can provide photos or short videos of any of Hillcrest's Dinner Theatre Events.
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In 2016 Turn Your Radio On 2 was produced. Our sound effects guys were at it again; this time for a caper set in the Old West, with plenty of songs, advertising jingles and silly jokes to boot!
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Please contact the church office if you can provide photos from any of our
Dinner Theatres Events. |
In 2017 we took a more serious turn with an evening of dramatic readings from Hon. J. Angus MacLean's memoir Making It Home. The readings focused on his escape from Nazi-occupied Holland during WWII; and were accompanied by music, including the By Da Molen, a beautiful love song performed in Dutch by William VanShuppen. The evening highlighted the bond forged between Canada and the Netherlands during the liberation of Holland.
Making It Home: A Remembrance In 1942, long before he was Premier or a Member of Parliament, Angus MacLean was the 28-year-old pilot of a Halifax heavy bomber. On the night of June 8, as he and his crew were attacking the Krupp armaments factory in Essen, Germany, they were hit by flak and a night fighter. Two engines were knocked out. The crippled plane turned for home but couldn’t maintain altitude. By the time they were over Holland and approaching the North Sea, they were down to 1200 feet and falling. Angus gave the order to bail out. His crew went first and he barely escaped, landing hard in the same field as his plane. After lying stunned and unable to move for a few minutes, he regained the feeling in his legs, and gathered up his parachute and hid it under a bridge. So began a 72-day ordeal to escape the Nazis which took him through Holland, Belgium and France in the care of the heroic men and women of the Underground. |
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Please contact us if you can provide
more photos from our Dinner Theatres. |
The theme of our 2018 dinner theatre was Let's Horse Around. This variety show highlighted PEI's long love affair with horses. It included dramatic readings from author (and Hillcrest member) Marian Bruce's beautiful book Remembering Old Dan. "There has always seemed to be a special communion between farm families and their horses, a fact confirmed by the number of family photographs in which the favourite horse also makes an appearance." - Alan Buchanan (forward to R.O.D)
The Hillcrest Players were planning an evening that included readings from treasured local histories when Covid 19 hit in 2020. We hope to soon celebrate better times with the return of our dinner theatre adventures. |