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Previously:

• City, LRT Partnership Hope Storage Agreement Leads to Future Venue for Theater Group

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As Crescent City gears up for a multi-day party to celebrate Independence Day, one traditional event has a new home at the Cultural Center this year.

Lighthouse Repertory Theatre will hold its annual melodrama, “The Great Ice Cream Scheme,” at 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. Sunday. It’s LRT’s first production since the COVID-19 pandemic and a potential prelude to further partnership between the nonprofit organization and the city, Executive Director David McPhail told the Wild Rivers Outpost on Monday.

“We’re hoping to be able to keep that as our home base,” he said of the Cultural Center, “moving on to working together with the city and using our building fund donation money to make improvements on the staging, the kitchen, the seating, and all that stuff.”

Four members of the Crescent City Council voted unanimously Thursday to waive rental fees for LRT’s use of the Cultural Center on Sunday. Crescent City Mayor Jason Greenough was absent.

This will enable LRT to offer free admission to its melodrama, according to McPhail, though donations will be welcome.

“We’re really in dire need of donations,” he said.

Forced to put its productions on hold, LRT went on sabbatical during the COVID-19 pandemic. But for the past five weeks roughly the melodrama’s cast, ranging in age from 16 to “around 50 or so,” have been rehearsing four nights a week, production director Dan McGlasson said.

The melodrama consists of 11 characters, he said, and about half the cast are new to the group.

“Everybody’s really pitched in — they’re being professionals about it,” McGlasson said. “We had to get rid of a lot of our costumes and a lot of our set pieces so we’ve really scrounged to find things.”

According to McPhail, the melodrama is a comedy love story with an ice cream theme. Character names include Etta Lotta Spumoni, Alec de Spoon, Candy Sprinkles and Nana Peel, according to a May 27 post on LRT’s Facebook page. There’s also a Robin Baskins, according to the post.

Players in the melodrama include Jamie Bree Legate, Edgar Perez, Juliana Cole, Ashley Coburn, Kendra Scanlon, Matthew Perez, Kimmie Starets Foote, Justina Miller and Anson Rotola.

“The melodrama’s so much fun because it’s over the top,” McGlasson told the Outpost. “We go right into the audience and get the audience involved. I like to say, you get to boo the hero and cheer the villain — it’s supposed to be the other way around.”

Beyond the 4th of July, LRT has its eyes set on a Christmas production and “that would be it for this year,” McPhail said. The organization will also be working on a further partnership with the city to improve the Cultural Center, he said.

McPhail said he hopes LRT can turn the Cultural Center into a place people will want to rent, making it profitable for the city. He said he is already working on colored renderings of new seating and portable staging that could be retracted and put away when it needs to be.

“We’ll have that for people to see and we’ll have different cards if people (would like to) pledge toward certain pieces of equipment,” he said.

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