My children and I last saw Beauty And The Beast performed by the same theater group a couple years ago, and it was fantastic. At that time, they were performing their plays at their own center (small stage on Beach Street in Daytona Beach) and at the Daytona Beach Community College.
Now, they are performing at the brand new News-Journal Center on Beach Street.
Let's just hope they work out the technical glitches before my summer subscription kicks in for five more plays, because we saw BATB on the second night it opened at the new NJ-Center, and it was... so-so.
Curtains catching on each other, fireworks going off and smoke billowing around the upper atmosphere for 20 minutes, air conditioning that turned on and off sporadically during the performance, and worst of all, the music-to-singing volume ratio was horribly out of balance. At first, I thought my own hearing was to blame, but then I noted two different couples within seats of my position commenting on that very problem during the intermission! The orchestra drowned out the verbal portion of the play at every turn. One slightly laughable situation (which the actor, James Haase playing Gaston, handled quite well) was when Gaston's armband got caught on Le Fou's (played by Mark Catlett) shirt button after Gaston lifted him up and then brought him down. James very quickly tried to get the armband removed from his partner's shirt, then immediately gave up and slid his arm OUT of the trapped costume piece... the result being that Le Fou sang for the next two minutes with an armband hanging from his chest (which eventually fell off and disappeared during the next scene via a set change).
We "enjoyed" the play, but in truth, it was very troubled -- and I'm sure they'll work these things out. Well, I hope they work these things out.
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