Bravo Shannon!

29th July 2023 by Site Admin

previously published on the home page

Our deputy Chair Shannon Rewcroft received a well deserved standing ovation at Wimbledon Theatre following a brilliant solo performance in her Build a Rocket Production directed by CAA member Jordan Langford.

Fortunately it was captured on video. Hit the image below to view the short clip.

For more information on this production and, links to yet more information please visit the CAA Member’s Gig Guide’ archive section here.

Any CAA member can use this TOTALLY FREE search engine optimised service to publicise any staged event.

Best of all! After the event the post is archived with all keywords intact! It’s the CAA gift that keeps on giving!!

Chris Hare

Edinburgh Here They Come… With our help

26th June 202326th June 2023 by Site Admin

CAA young members Shannon Rewcroft and Jordan Langford are two creatives from Scarborough doing all they can to get their show, Build a Rocket by Christopher York to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this August.

They have been offered a week’s run at Just the Tonic, a venue right in the heart of Edinburgh. I’ve seen the show at Wimbledon Theatre and it is a wonderful production with Shannon delivering a superb solo performance. A real tour de force! Shannon and Jordan are passionate about this production but here’s the snag,

Taking a show to Edinburgh is expensive and for young artists it becomes almost impossible financially without back up. So being determined not to let a little thing like money stand in their way, they are asking for our help.

Why go to the fringe? They first worked on the piece in 2022 for director Jordan Langford’s MA in Directing at Rose Bruford College. They fell in love with it and feel it is a truly special piece of writing. Having a fully-fledged one-woman show ready to go they were itching to share this story with as many audiences as they could. So they produced it themselves…not an easy task.

The play’s author Christopher York was also born in Scarborough. Working on something that’s set in their hometown, they felt so connected to the characters and the story. They also resonate with the struggles of the play. Yasmin (the central character of Build a Rocket) is defiant to triumph over adversity!

They want to take their bit of Scarborough to as many places as they can, the long-term aim is to have a production company on board so they can take a community production of Build a Rocket around Yorkshire and the UK. To achieve that aim, they need to get Build a Rocket on the map, get people seeing it, talking about it and excited about it. Where better than the biggest fringe festival in the world?

It is also a career-changing opportunity for them. Jordan graduated in October 2022 as a director and having a production up in Edinburgh in the first year of graduating would help his career go from strength to strength. Shannon has been acting since she graduated from Drama Studio London nine years ago but has never had the chance to perform a one-woman play, let alone one that is set in her hometown and lets her use her own voice. This would be an incredible opportunity for both of them.

What is the show about? Build a Rocket is a one-woman play following the defiant and inspiring story of Yasmin, a teenager from Scarborough whose life is not sandcastles, arcades, and donkey rides as she finds herself pregnant and alone in the world. The show follows her story for eighteen years until her son is coming of age. A unique and bold production, Build a Rocket tells an inspiring, whirlwind story while challenging commonly held perceptions of young motherhood.

Christopher York comments, “Teenage pregnancy is so demonized and we’re quick to blame teenagers. There was a girl I was at school with who had a child at 15. I was astounded at her resilience and that she went on to pass her GCSEs, go to college and university, get married, and raise a wonderful human being. She is a phenomenal person. We are still conservative about these topics. If we were more open and Scandinavian about how we tackled sex and sexual health, especially with young people, we may not have the statistics we do.

So far the project has been self-funded with anything Shannon and Jordan could scrape together, which hasn’t been much. All their set/costumes/props have come from charity shops or have been gifted to them or they have painted/created.

Money raised through fund raising will be used for:

Venue Fees, Festival Registration Fees, Brochure fees, Advertising and Marketing,
Accommodation, Travel, PRS License, Accessibility, Per Diems (basically, a posh way of saying money for the day, so we can eat whilst there!)

They currently won’t be taking a fee. If they get to the fringe and happen to make any profit on the tickets they will split that equally but they are not in this for the money, it’s pure passion that is fuelling their drive to get to Edinburgh and beyond.

So let’s help these valued members of our club realise their dream, really get behind them and chip in as much as we can.

The GoFundMe link can be found below.

Chris Hare

Guidance for Artwork Submissions

26th August 20238th May 2023 by Site Admin

Foreward…

Nothing in the following post changes anything that is working so very well… Generally members ask the website editor Chris Hare for something, he then does his editor stuff and passes his instructions to me understanding it will be actioned within 72 hours max and usually significantly faster!

Please Note…

All artwork featured on this notice is for upcoming events at time of publishing! In each case, once date expired they are moved to a permanently visible archive for the purpose of keyword retention and general interest, so please include the year in the event date!!!

These brief notes are provided here to help with the faster publishing of members’ artwork.

Increasingly members are creating posters and banners offline for publishing on this website.

Such entirely voluntary member participation is very welcome and greatly encouraged.

Furthermore if the artwork is website ready it can be published faster and with less administration time which can help to keep website costs as low as possible!

Passive Artwork…

The coronation party poster illustrated here is a static or passive image. As an image it cannot be read by search engines! Google for example will index it as “an image on the CAA website”

In most cases the image or banner includes artistes’ names and if an online search for that name produced this image in the results it would be fantastic for the artiste and also help maintain the website’s ranking too.

The Important Solutions…

Images need to be sent to the website editor in file formats of .jpg .jpeg or .png with a MAXIMUM width of 1024 pixels (I can easily re-size if a problem & height is not important.)

Please also ensure there are no spelling errors since we can’t correct them easily if at all and artwork may be rejected as a result.

“Ease of access” to the internet is considered hugely important in search rankings epecially for sight impaired or blind persons!

Special software can read out a description of the image to the user over their computer or phone. Failure to provide such assistance can lower a web page’s overall score significantly!

To the left (or above on a phone) is a screenshot of the submission made for this poster yesterday.

You will see that I’ve added a description which is much the same as the text on the image. As was in this case the text was provided simultaneously in the same email submission to the editor. Here it was in .pdf format in upper case but, could have been just as easily included into the submission email and case is not important.

It need not be every bit of text in the image but needs to adequately decribe the image to a sight impaired reader, however they come to discover the page.

The text is thus written into the page code and indexed accordingly by all search engines including all relevant details.

Active Artwork…

Alternatively you might want to consider this method for submissions?

Below is an example of active artwork! In this instance I was provided with all the text and the two smaller pictures. I sourced a background without text and published it. Such backgrounds can also be submitted if you have one in mind?

The advantage here is that the text IS readable straight from the banner and any subsequent changes can be made on the fly.

Plus the text adapts actively to the readers’ device regardless of size. In most cases this is how submissions are made for the ‘Members Gig Guide‘ too.

The more observant and regular readers here might have also noticed that for quite a while now, I’ve included the current year within the date stamps? This seemingly superfluous inclusion makes sense only when so much of this website is now being archived and in a digital World could last until the end of time!?

Stop Press!…

Below that further is a repeatable example of a templated banner that ticks all the boxes and includes many valuable keywords!

I’m only allowed to include this once per page per year so make no excuse for including it on this page. However banners such as these observe special rules outside of the topic of this page… Nonetheless did start the same way at the outset! I had to do it with help from Chris Hare (website editor.) These are probably the only examples where outside artwork is not practical in the grand scheme of things when allowing for future variables?

Well done to those that have already got creative… Thank you and Keep up the good work!

Paul Scudder (Site Admin)

FRIDAY 19th MAY 2023 at 7.30pm

’OUT OF THIS WORLD’

A wonderful evening celebrating the great lyricist

JOHNNY MERCER

SARAH MOULE (Vocals)

SIMON WALLACE (Piano and Musical Director), ALEC DANKWORTH (Bass) KENRICK ROWE (Drums)

AUTUMN LEAVES, COME RAIN OR COME SHINE, DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES, MOON RIVER and many more Mercer hits.

£20 (Members) £22 (Guests) Call the office 020 7836 3172

Example below of a repeatable templated banner best left to be dealt with in-house!

FRIDAY 16th JUNE 2023 at 7.30pm

OPEN MIC NIGHT!

PERFORMERS & AUDIENCE WELCOME!

Compere ~ DAVID POWER

Pianist ~ LAURENCE PAYNE

Singers, Dancers, Actors, Magicians, Comedians & Intrumentalists

Performers, please bring your own sheet music

£5 entrance fee

Finally…

At time of publication these two excellent off-line artwork submissions are also upcoming events! Another is in the Members Gig Guide too.

Audrey Leybourne 1927 – 2022

16th December 20228th December 2022 by Site Admin

Much loved CAA Member Audrey Leybourne passed away on 1^st December 2022 aged 95. She had been a member of the club since 1991 and was a regular attendee. Audrey was always full of fun and good humour and a great supporter of the Monday Night Shows.

She was born in Cardiff on 19^th February 1927. Growing up in 1930s Cardiff she attended the Welsh National College of Music and Drama. It was here she was spotted by Donald Wolfit who offered her a scholarship to tour with his company as an acting A.S.M. In 1953 she rejoined Wolfit’s company for a production of Henry 1V part one at Hammersmith.

Audrey moved to London in the 1960s and in 1967 appeared as Old Sally alongside Barry Humphries as Fagin in a revival of Oliver. She played countless diverse roles on tour as an actor, singer and dancer covering the whole country. Her notable stage credits, which underlines her amazing versatility, include the first stage version of Winnie The Pooh and an acclaimed production of the Amazons at Nottingham Playhouse.

She appeared in The Beggar’s Opera and Black Comedy in Ipswich. Then received rave reviews for appearances in Uncle Vanya and Come Blow Your Horn. She also toured in Noel Coward’s Bitter Sweet with June Bronhill. In 1979 she appeared in a production at the Adelphi with Tony Britton as Higgins.

Other credits are as a dancer in Richard Harris’ comedy Stepping Out; Kath in Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane; and Mrs Pugh in the musical Annie which toured abroad and featured Su Pollard who became a personal friend of Audrey.

Audrey appeared numerous times on TV and films. Her notable credits include; The Wednesday Play (1964), Churchill’s People (1974), The Old Curiosity Shop (1979), The Brack Report (1982), On The Line (1982), Screenplay (1986), Chaplin (1992), County Kilburn (2000), Doctors (2010), Bone China (2013), Stella (2014), Grandma’s Big Schlep (2015) and Carters Get Rich (2017)

She was a member of Les Dawson’s famous dance Troupe The Roly Polys in the 1980s. However it was an appearance on Britain’s Got Talent at the age of 90 that brought her overnight national fame. She sang ‘I Wanna be Loved By You.’ Amanda Holden asked her if she had ever been married. Audrey replied “No, but I have been in love many, many times – 22 Gentlemen!”

She made her panto debut at the age of 90 playing Potty T Potts in Beauty and the Beast and continued working into her 90s doing commercials and the occasional stage role.

Audrey was summed up by her vicar Rev. Simon Grigg. “She was a remarkable person and a real trouper of an actress. A much loved member of St. Pauls. She has a last message to you all. She said to me shortly before she died that if I pop off, tell everyone I don’t regret a thing. I’ve had a wonderful life.”

by Chris Hare

Funeral of Her Majesty The Queen

19th September 2022 by Site Admin

The club is deeply saddened by the passing of Her Majesty.

A great supporter of the arts and performance generally. Many of our members have been in her company at Royal shows. The national anthem is still sung after every Monday Show and that tradition will continue. God Save the King!