Saturday, June 24, 2006

Last Chance for Summer Classes (ages 4-19)

Just a few spaces left in Pisces Moon Educational's summer class series for youths. Programs available for ages 4 to 19. Classes with remaining limited availability. (Updated as of June 22, 2006)

ArtStart Moon Magic : July 3 - 8
Dead Men Tell No Tales : July 3 - 8
Mad Adventures of Mr. Toad (1pm-5pm) : July 10 - 14
Theatrical Time Machine : August 7 - 11 and Aug 14 - 18
Peter Pan Puppetry : August 7 - 11 and Aug 14 - 18

Register Now : Click here for our registration form
or call 831-429-2328
or email terri@piscesmoon.org

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Are You a Playwright of Any Age?


If you are an aspiring playwright there are many contests around the country where you can submit your work. One of the established groups doing this is Actors' Theatre right here in Santa Cruz. They have been producing "Eight Tens @ Eight" their annual play festival for 12 years now showingcasing new talent. Your play could be one of those. The deadline though is July first so you'll need to act quickly. If you are writing a full length play there is another contest with a deadline of October 1st, 2006. And now they have just launched a contest for "young playwrights" for elementary, middle and high school youngsters. All the information about the three programs is available on Actors' Theatres web site.

Sunday, June 18, 2006

Tell us what will bring you back here

We'd like your input to make this a valuable blog for the theatre community. We hope you'll take our 9 question survey to give us some feedback about what you might want to see here in the future to make this blog an interesting place for you to return to. Click here to take survey

Get new posts via email

A new enhancements today to the blog. We added the ability to subscribe and get new stories delivered directly into your email account. This is great for people who don't regularly use a news reader. We all check email, so getting new stories sent directly to us by email certainly is an easy option. To sign up enter your email address on the link to the right of the blog. You will be then asked to type in a special code that shows up on the screen. This is a safety precaution against spammers. And then you'll get an email. You will need to click on the link in this email to activate the email subscription. The email will spell it all out too. This is of course yet another step designed to prevent spammers from being able to add your email address without your consent. Two extra steps but they are quick and it is making the world a safer place for email. For those technically interested, we are using Feedster to provide this service.

Newsfeeds Now Easier to Subscribe to

We've made it easier to sign up to get automatic updates of new stories (posts) that appear here. Just click on the Orange Icon on the right of the blog and it will give you a choice of places you can have the information automatically sent to. This includes My.Yahoo as well as Google and all the major news and blog reading software packages. One more click and you are done. The original Atom feed that was set up produced an xml page which, frankly, took even our web savvy friends a bit extra time to set up. Now you can let the software do all the work for you and don't even need to see the phrase "xml" again. Just know you are part of the blogging world. Do you feel cool yet?

Friday, June 16, 2006

Added RSS (Atom) newsfeed service

On the right side of our blog you can now find the news feed link. This link allows you to see updates of new posts to the blog inside of your other blog reading applications. The great news is that most people already have one of these tools such as My.Yahoo, Safari, FireFox, and others. This means that everytime there is a new post on the Pisces Moon blog you'll see the headline in a program you use everyday and then you can click to read more. Of course you can also just bookmark this blog web site and check back in every so often, but try out the RSS feed and you'll feel totally up to date in this new internet world. Let the news come to you!

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Auditions Completed for "Last Days"

Auditions for The Last Days of Judas Iscariot are now complete. This is a Pisces Moon Production to be performed at the Broadway Playhouse in Santa Cruz, California. Thank you all for your interest and coming out to the auditions. Final cast notice will be posted on our Blog soon.

July Calendar of Classes for Pisces Moon Educational


Click here for more details.

Survey Results from Pisces Moon

Thank you to all who responded to Pisces Moon's May “Four Questions” survey! You provided valuable information both to us and to the organization that may help us to fund our web marketing. An overwhelming number of you (86%) wanted to be able to register for classes and buy tickets for productions online. Sixty-seven percent of respondents felt that the website and email notices were very or extremely valuable. Your comments helped to guide us in directions where we can improve, and your support of our current program and hope for its expansion was gratifying. Some of your specific suggestions included providing the ability to register for classes and buy tickets for productions online, improve web navigation, particularly for the educational section, expand our website so that instead of pdfs for class information, we’ll have quicker loading HTML pages. For those who want more audition notices, please be assured that we send audition notices for each production to those that have specified "auditions" in their email preferences.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Kristen Vaughan Gets Rave Reviews in NY


The New York Times called Kristen Vaughan’s performance in Mrs. California, recently at the 78th Street Theater Lab in New York, “perfectly played” - Full Review.



while Backstage called her “funny and positively magnetic” - Full Review


Kristen graced Pisces Moon’s stage in Santa Cruz productions of The Food Chain, The Altruists, The Laramie Project (2002 and 2003) and Five Flights, where she was equally mesmerizing. - Past Shows

Kristen's web site.



Monday, June 12, 2006

Adam Bock Nominated for GLAAD Award



Adam Bock's Swimming in the Shallows was nominated for a GLAAD Media award for 2005 Broadway and Off-Broadway shows. GLAAD honors "fair, accurate and inclusive" representation of gay individuals in the media. Pisces Moon Productions performed Swimming in the Shallows in February 2004 in Santa Cruz. We also performed Adam's Five Flights, immediately following its San Francisco debut in the spring of 2003.

Sunday, June 11, 2006

Past Shows


Pisces Moon Productions keep an online archive of our past productions.

Online Ticketing

We recently did a survey of our email list subscribers and found that 80% of them were interested in having us sell tickets to our shows online. Being close to Silicon Valley, this makes sense that our audience and potential audience (especially our email list) is very tuned into doing things on the web. Now the harder part is figuring out an economical way to provide this capability. We host our web with Network Solutions and they have added a PayPal processing capability. But I have not found a way to limit the number of seats to a show. I have found through Google a whole bunch of internet based software packages that can be used for online ticketing. Many of them sound great. But they are clearly designed for either larger non-profits or profit making enterprises. These software vendors have to make a living too, I guess. So far the pricing has been prohibitive but we are waiting to hear back from a few suppliers who did no provide pricing on the web. If anyone has other suggestions on how to approach this issue, they are welcome.

Pisces Moon's Next Production

The Last Days of Judas Iscariot by Stephen Adly Guirgis. Produced by Pisces Moon Productions. Directed by Susan Myer Silton. Full details on the web site.

Premieres September 29, 2006

An experiment

This is an experiment to see if a blog has value to a local community theatre company. We welcome your feedback. Only been blogging for 2 minutes now so I am sure there is much to learn as we go forward. Need to figure out a few formatting things too, but bear with us. Thanks. Although I have now learned how to spell check posts. Unless "blog" is not the proper spelling, then the spell checker may want to add the word "blog" to its dictionary!