Summer Fun For All The Family!

Well, hasn’t it been a long time! Sorry about our lack of blogs, but there was a very good reason… remember all that stuff we’ve been telling you we were going to do? Well, we just spent the summer actually doing it!

Our big goal for the last few months was to produce some theatre shows and we’ve put on 2 in August!

But before either of those opened, we kicked off the holidays with Stanley’s Fantastic Fun Day here at Stanley Halls in South Norwood, in partnership with our good friend, Captain Fantastic.

We were fortunate enough to recieve funding from our ward councillors for South Norwood and Selhurst to support costs for the venue and resources, but we also had lots of brilliant volunteers and local businesses like Splattermake who helped to make it a really magical day that families could enjoy for free!

We had discos, magic, crafts and soft play. There were beautiful toys and children’s clothes on sale from local entrepreneurs – and local children’s author and illustrator, Gillian Hibbs, gave a reading of her book Tilly’s At Home Holiday, bringing it to life in a wonderful interactive session.

The Fun Day was a huge success with over 320 visitors made up of 100 families coming along to celebrate National Play Day.
And helping everyone make the most of the fun was the cast of Captain Fantastic Saves The Day!

Princess Arya, Pirate Polly, Dr Zob and the Captain himself were on hand to make balloons and tell everyone about their upcoming adventures. And what adventures they were!

Over two days more than 300 people came to see Dr Zob steal all the light in the world and the Captain and his friends set sail in Polly’s ship to bring it back again. The show was a great hit – some people loved it so much they came twice!

After such a successful engagement with our local family audience, we’d love to bring more adventures for children to local theatres. Keep reading the blogs to find out what we’re up to next.

And we promise to get back to writing them regularly – we can learn to be busy and blog too! In fact there’s still our other August play to tell you about, but let’s make that a story for…

…Next time: Failing At Failing – changing the conversation around mental health through theatre.

Johnny Wolf

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