Kickstarter

UPDATE: HOORAY!!

As of last night, we reached our goal of $8720!

Thank you to everyone who helped us get there! For those who were watching and waiting to donate - every additional dollar raised now goes to make our final show of the season, Urinetown, happen! Due to behind-the-scenes fundraising done, we are within $2,000 of not having to hold a Kickstarter for that show at all!!! A whole new meaning to "buy one, get one" and we cannot fully express how grateful we are to everyone who has shown their support! See you at the State Theatre soon! 

So if you haven't contributed yet, please join us in making this season an even bigger success! On behalf of all of our company members, thank you.

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Running to Places Theatre Company is a nonprofit company for middle and high school aged artists to build community while doing great theatre. (You can learn more about us at www.runningtoplaces.org or facebook.com/runningtoplaces. The FB event for this Kickstarter project is www.facebook.com/events/228352203934530 if you care to share.)

We’re currently midway through our fifth season. Since our first show opened in 2008, we’ve done almost 30 full-scale productions, featuring hundreds of Tompkins, Cortland, and Tioga County’s brightest talent. There are kids from every school district in the area who meet, rehearse, have showmances, and make friendships with people they would have otherwise never had the chance to meet. Friendships that will last a lifetime.

They grow as people, developing life skills they’ll benefit from forever, such as the ability to speak in front of groups, to gracefully take and assimilate directions, to feel valued as an individual while understanding the value of the team, and to work under pressure with a deadline you can’t move (among many others).

We’re in the process of putting up our next show, Oklahoma, featuring over three dozen spectacular young performers from all over the area – and we’re short on funds to make it happen.

We’re a small and scrappy nonprofit youth-based theatre company, but that doesn’t mean we’re a volunteer organization. We operate using professional best practices on everything from our design process to the scheduling of breaks during rehearsals. And this means we produce fully realized shows with artistically meritorious designs executed by professionals in their fields who we pay for their time, talent, and mentorship. We don’t do shows with generic rented designs or painted cardboard scenery.

We are pretty expert by now in doing a heck of a lot with very little resources. We budget our season very tightly and very carefully. We’ve been right on budget all season long for expenses, and we’ve met all of our income projections except for one area – overall fundraising.

It’s been a tough year, and we know a lot of folks are stretched pretty thin by this economy. So we’re turning to Kickstarter to help us close the gap and raise the rest of the money we’ll need to put on our show. We need to raise $8720 by June 9 to be able to put up Oklahoma. 

We’ve already covered the cost of licensing the show, renting the scripts and scores, having the designers create beautiful, original work to bring the show to life, renting the theatre – but we literally won’t be able to pay to build the set, light the stage, finish the costumes, print the programs -- all the things that make this a complete production – without your help.

So, on behalf of the everyone working on Oklahoma and the entire Running to Places family – thanks!

Curly: Josiah Rawlings
Laurey: Sarah Beckwith
Will: Matt Avery
Ado Annie: Haley Evanoski
Ali Hakim: Felix Fernandez-Penny
Carnes: Mollie Duell
Aunt Eller: Charlotte Senders
Jud Fry: James Palmer
Gertie: Sarah Griggs
Ellen: Lisa Poldulka
Virginia: Maddie Vandenberg
Kate: Sari Koppel
Vivian: Sophia Tantillo
Ike Skidmore: Alexander Cassetti
Slim: Anthony Nigro
Cord Elam: Bailey Fox Olmstead

Ensemble:
Adrian Bauchner
Alexandra Henry
Annie Romano
Aram Steinhagen
Ariana Rivera
Brenna Wilson
Cali Newman
Chelsa Tifft
Emily Schweitzer
Finn Kellmurray 
Ilana Wallenstein
Ilana Wilensky
Jewell Payne
Julia Machlin
Kyra Umrigar 
Laura Fegely
Max Avramis
Sirena Carpenter
Stephanie Baxendell

Director: Joey Steinhagen
Producer: Gail Belokur
Choreographer: Todd Peterson
Music Director: Mike Wade
Technical Director: Pierre Clavel
Scenic Designer: Tyler M. Perry
Lighting Designer: David Arsenault
Costume Designer: Lilly Westbrook

(You can learn more about us at www.runningtoplaces.org or facebook.com/runningtoplaces.)