By BRANDON SAGLAM

Photos by BRANDON SAGLAM

On Thursday, Jan. 11, the Blackhawk Theatre Company put on an encore of their production of “One Man Two Guvnors” in celebration of the production winning first place for the California Educational Theatre Association. The BTC was judged against the best schools in Southern California and the encore was a great achievement for the company.

The company traveled to Los Osos High school for the CETA festival on Jan. 12 where they watched other schools that they competed against. They then performed that Saturday night, gaining a resounding reception from their audience which, based on accounts of night, was laughing throughout the performance and when their accompanying band “The Craze” finished their performance, the audience called for an encore, and as they performed, the audience, in fact, came to the edge of the stage as the rest of the cast and production watched with glee from a monitor behind stage. The production was later presented the audience’s choice award.

When senior Sarah Wilson who played Gareth was asked what it was like performing in a much larger theatre compared to Citrus Valley, especially amongst other esteemed high schools, she responded saying, “It was very exciting going from a house of less than 500 to a house of about 1200 kids, it was intense and the amount of energy that they would give us would come out in our performance, the energy was just balanced, and it felt like an extremely high honour that we were there let alone win the Audience’s Choice Award in the end, especially with such good schools also performing that weekend.”

Stage tech Gary Long, sophomore, was asked if there were ever any worries moving such a large stage set especially since there are multiple sets for the different scenes.  He responded by explaining, “There were definitely worries with the set because we got the wrong measurements for the stage, so we kind of over-thought it and we made our set smaller when their stage is actually bigger than our stage. So it was kind of confusing. We had to cut off space when we did not need to, but when we got there the build time was an hour. That’s huge considering how big the set was. Putting on the track was not that difficult, but unloading it was.”

The immense success of “One Man Two Guvnors” adds to an already huge pile of awards and praises that the BTC has received over the past years that it has been producing shows. After the school year, a bright future is expected for the company.