LGCSF Recording History: Group Therapy

Hello to all of my faithful readers and to you new members of the group who have been reading this blog. I thank and appreciate your reading our history because I feel it is important to have this out there for everyone to read. Any feedback from you is always appreciated.

"Group Therapy" was the brainchild of our talented and beautiful June Bonacich and somewhat loosely based on her experience of group therapy or so I've been told. This was the first musical written especially just for LGCSF and June worked closely with Stephanie Smith, our AD for this production. If any of you have been part of a musical you know that there is a lot of collaboration among everyone involved. This was true for us but we knew we had something really wonderful to present to our audience.

It was hard work and lots of fun for all of us to learn the music for this musical. The main cast also had to do extra work to learn their lines and their roles. For me it was really great to watch them as they all really got their roles and were able to do a little improvisation during the performances we gave. The opening weekend of "Group Therapy" we gave three performances on November 3, 4 and 5, 2005 with a dress rehearsal on November 2. The dress rehearsal was the performance that was recorded for our CD of the show so it was all done on the first take. The production staff and production committee all worked their butts off to make sure everything went smoothly. Even the orchestra we had was beautiful. It consisted of June Bonacich on synthesizer, Alyras on bass, Erika Johnson on drums, Luba Kravchenko on piano and Ashley Moore on electric guitar.

The cast was Katie: Wendy Tobias; Stan: Shane Kroll; Jenny: Noam Szoke; Evelyn the therapist: Mary Cantrell; P. Francis Tucker: Scott Turco; Jill: Sharon Gong; Marybeth: CeCe Cannavo; Nathan: Jed Herman. Many in this group have had some kind of experience in local or high school musical productions.

The chorus also took "Group Therapy" on the road in 2006 where we did three performances as part of the culture week at the Gay Games in Chicago and this was fun for us to present it to a whole new audience.

If anyone would like to borrow my CD of this show just let me know and I will be happy to share it with you. Take care of yourselves this week and see you on Thursday at rehearsal.

Cheers and my love, Michael Lucero