New West Theatre, like every theatre company has had to adapt to  a post- Covid world.
 So this year‘s summer production is a limited run ’50s and ’60s show  “Live At the Drive In,” at Exhibition Park, Aug. 12-16.

Patrons will have a full drive in-experience,  they will drive their cars into the Exhibition Park parking lot, park in front of the stage and tune their radios to a special station to listen. The cast are on the same stage  that acts perform on during The Rotary Dragon Boat Races and Canada Day celebrations, but there are also video screens on each side offering a close up view of the cast.

“It’s all been pretty exciting, and a challenging experience,” said director Kelly Reay, noting in addition to having to put together  the multiple pieces of a show, they have also had to figure out the logistics of getting cars in and out of Exhibition Park.

“Never would we have imagined we‘d be doing a drive in performance. But luckily Alberta Health has some pretty specific guidelines we’ve been able to follow. And safety has been our number one priority,” he continued, noting the cast and crew are tested for Covid regularly.

“We’re also lucky we’re a cohort. We’re like a family,” he said. Patrons can also  roll their  windows down and are welcome to cheer and honk in appreciation.
 Cars will be parked 10 feet apart and the small six person cast are perform apart on stage. They will be performing pop and rock hits of the ’50s and ’60s ranging from Paul Anka to Bill Haley and the Comets.

“It’s the American Graffiti era. This show is more of a concert experience than a performance. It’s not the same as performing at the Yates, so there isn’t as much physical comedy. There‘s more joke telling,” he continued, adding that doesn’t mean the jokes are at about the ’50s and ’60s.

“There are a lot of jokes about that era, but there is a lot of contemporary humour. We couldn’t not do jokes about the Covid issue.”
 The cast included familiar faces including Scott Carpenter, Katie Fellger, Kyle Gruninger, Erica Hunt, Rylan Kunkel, Kathy Zaborsky and musicians Scott Mezei and Keenan Pezderic.
 “And the cast also play musical instruments,” Reay added.

Covid-19 has pretty much crippled entertainment as we know it. But it has lead to artists experimenting with new ways to get their art out to people.

Most theatre companies have gone online or broadcasted through social media. The Lethbridge Shakespeare Performance society has also done that, but they were also first out of the gate to have a live performance of this summer’s production of the Merry Wives of Windsor.

 The dozen cast members performed in front of a live audience once this summer and finished their season with a sold out performance of the Shakespeare farce at the Nikka Yuko Japanese Gardens, Aug. 6.

 I forgot how much I missed live theatre, and even more, being part of the troupe.

 So I joined the sold out audience of 75 at the Gardens, who were laughing and chuckling throughout the comedy.

 The talented cast, some playing multiple characters performed director John Poulsen’s abridged reader’s theatre version of the comedy.
 The cast as the audience sat six feet apart from each other.
 The cast switched costumes and wigs as well as  cracked Shakespearian dirty jokes as the audience laughed appreciatively.

 There were a lot of familiar faces including highlight’s from last year’s production of Macbeth including Trevor Loman, the always beaming Chelsea Fitzsimmons and veterans like the scene stealing Cole Fetting, Chris Kyle Peterson, Jeff Graham and Andrew Legg.

New west Theatre is  still here. But instead of being on stage at the Yates Theatre, they are on the air performing old school radio plays for the next two weeks.
 They air Thursday nights at 8 p.m.
“We’re still here and though people can’t interact with us face to face, we still want to interact with our audience,” said New West Theatre artistic director Kelly Reay.

 Last week, they debuted  their first night of classic Alfred Hitchcock plays.
 They continue in  the Hitchcock vein tonight with “ The 39 Steps” and Sherlock Holmes’  ‘Murder at the Casbah.’

“ ‘The 39 Steps’ was written as a radio play to perform on stage. So if we were performing it live, we‘d have a set that looks like a radio station,” Reay said.
“And ‘ Murder at the Casbah’ is a classic Sherlock Holmes mystery, that is solved like only Sherlock Holmes can,” he continued, adding they just finished recording next week’s production of ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” sandwiched between two episodes of Flash Gordon.

“Those have been a lot of fun to do, looking at science fiction through the eyes of  the 1930s,” he said.

People who want to hear the shows can e-mail New West Theatre and they will be sent a link.

 Most of the plays have been public domain and will be available through the public domain, except the Hitchcock episodes.

“ They were on our website for a few days because we could only air them for a specific window. The public domain shows will be up for longer,” Reay said.

Like all theatre companies, they are experimenting during Covid.