Gallery • 5 Photos

Female lead Heavenlee Escobar (12) play fights with the male lead, Clayton Holdredge (10)

Dating is hard. Bad dating takes it to a different level. Englewood actors put on Check, Please this past weekend to sold-out audiences Thursday and Friday. The culinary students prepared a meal to give the presentation a dinner theater feel. 

Sophomore Clayton Holdredge had a big part, “I played the lead. His name was Guy.” 

Check, Please is a play by Jonathan Rand. It is the story of a man and a woman who embark on a quest to find love. They go on multiple bad dates in search of each other. Each date is worse than the last, but there may be a light at the end of the dating tunnel even if it doesn’t lead to love, “So what he did was he went on all these horrible blind dates and, and the end of the play he ended up falling in love with a girl who was also going on all these horrible blind dates,” said Holdredge. 

 He has loved the theater since he was little and took part in his first play in seventh grade. He is proud of his performance, “I thought it was really good. I thought I portrayed my character, how he was meant to be portrayed and it was a lot of fun,” and he is excited about how well the play was received by audiences, “I think it was something like eight weeks, we had to prep for this play, and so it wasn’t a lot of time to do all the little things that we wanted to do but we still found a way to do them. I was most proud of what we got accomplished and the time that we had.”

One of his dates, Pearl, stole silverware, a cup, flowers and eventually the table cloth and sugar packets. She was played by freshmen Josie Brennan, “It was my first time with speaking lines. It as fun to see how they wanted me to portray her. Figuring out what I was going to wear. Did they want me to be arrogant, sneaky or just ignoring the fact that I was stealing things.” Brennan participated in plays during middle school, but this was her first high school show, “It was a lot of fun. Mrs. Pickering is really cool and she directed really well. It was fun getting to work with catering.” 

There was one small wrench in the cog Saturday as numerous members of the cast took ill and the show Saturday night had to be canceled, “I felt horrible because everyone was like really looking forward to performing but I was really sick, so I couldn’t so I felt really bad, that we couldn’t perform, but I was not in any condition to perform,” said Holdredge. 

Theater director Amy Pickering was very proud of her actors and stagehands who made the play a success. She is excited about the theater program and all of the opportunities they will have this year, “We are doing The Addams Family on March 6 and 7. Auditions are Wednesday, Dec 4 and callbacks (if necessary) are Dec 5. Auditions will be groups of 10 students in 20-minute slots, from 3:30 – 5:50 pm.”

 Pickering is trying something new and having an Audition Bootcamp November 20, from 3:45 – 5:45 to help students with auditioning. There will be monologue options, songs to look at and listen to, and a little bit of choreography to learn at boot camp. It is not required to go to boot camp to audition. Sign-ups to audition will be on the Black Box door on Thursday, Nov. 21.