By Artistic Director Dexter Fidler

I'm always amazed at the audiences' willingness to suspend their disbelief and follow us on a journey. Fairies walk on stage, 16 years pass in the blink of a song, and a curse is broken with a kiss. The audience willingly and unquestioningly follows the actors as the story unfolds. But I also know how tenuous that spell can be: as much as we want to believe Peter Pan can fly, it's hard not to see the wires. And it can take just one wrong detail to jolt us out of the story unfolding before us. For every 600 audience members, there's almost always one geek who will mutter "A wristwatch in 1890? Those weren't common until after World war I!" (OK...that was me.) In every play there is a unique tension of getting all of the details right even as we trust that the audience will overlook some of the more problematic issues. Because if we get those details right, then cruel reality won't jar the audience from the real story of the play.

Given that, you may be able to imagine my trepidation two weeks ago as I prepared to work with the ensemble on one of the very important details of Sleeping Beauty: baby duty. Sleeping Beauty begins right after the Princess Beauty has been born, and there is a pivotal moment when the Nursemaids and Footmen try to soothe the baby back to sleep. As you might guess, this involves a fair amount of handling of the baby. If we do our job perfectly, will anyone truly think it's a real baby on stage? Actually, I hope not - I really don't need a call from Child Protective Services. But I know that for the story to work, the audience has to believe that's baby Beauty being passed around like a hot potato, and not notice it's a prop. So for an hour, we worked on how to properly hold a baby: supporting the neck, holding the baby close to your body to make her feel secure, keeping the head higher than the feet. While the cast did great, I know we'll need to work it some more, and probably some more after that, to get everyone just right. All to make sure that you're following the right story, and not noticing the prop.

It's all part of producing a show. In this case, I was lucky - I have a fair amount of personal memories of holding my own babies (ages 6 and 9, now). Not like when I directed Guys and Dolls and had to learn how to shoot dice. That would have been fun, if it hadn't been so expensive.

Come see how well our actors handle "bringing up baby" in our production of Sleeping Beauty, running May 9 - 17 at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts!

Don't miss Gentry Magazine's 16th annual gala, benefiting Peninsula Youth Theatre!

The Gala is a spectacular celebration featuring fine food from more than 30 restaurants, great entertainment, a spectacular silent auction and dancing till midnight with the Joe Sheldon Band.

Have a great time while supporting a great cause - $80 of each $100 ticket goes directly towards supporting PYT programs and services!

We're also looking for some great volunteers to help at the auction. If you're interested in helping, email ksimpson@pytnet.org.

PYT would like to welcome and thank our newest corporate sponsor, Camino Pediatric Dentistry of Sunnyvale. Camino Pediatric is dedicated to seeing children from age one to early adolescence. Their staff is devoted to creating a child-friendly dental office environment.

Dr. Grace Lee is a Board-Certified Pediatric Dentist. She received her dental degree from UCLA and completed her residency training at Cincinnati Children's Hospital.

Dr. Lee is proud to help sponsor PYT and looks forward to seeing everyone here.

"Once upon a time, Chicken Licken was standing around when a piece of something landed on her head."

So begins Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith's Caldecott Honor winning book The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. PYT brings John Glore's adaptation of this uproarious children's story to the stage May 22 and 23 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts.

Join your narrator Jack as he leads the audience through such fractured fairy tales as "The Tortoise and the Hair," "Cinderumplestiltskin" and "Little Red Running Shorts."

PYT is thrilled to announce that we recently received funding from the Arts Council Silicon Valley's "Applied Materials Artistic and Program Excellence" program in order to fund an original play from well-known children's playwright Kate Hawley, author of our current production of Sleeping Beauty.

"While we have produced several new scripts in the last five years, this is the first time we've been able to commission a playwright to write a script specifically for our program. It would be exciting for any theater to be able to commission a playwright of Kate's stature, but for a youth theater, it's an incredible validation of the work we've been doing with Stories on Stage. Kate has been a great supporter of PYT and has allowed us to use other scripts of hers in the past," according to Dexter Fidler, PYT's artistic director.

Kate is currently hard at work adapting Puss 'n Boots for our 2009-10 Stories on Stage season. Look for more information about this and all of our upcoming shows in coming issues of the newsletter!