Hi! 

Not to brag, but last weekend really felt like summer.

Friday night, Maddy, Mehgan, Derek, and I drank beers while setting up for the neighborhood garage sale.

I was up at 7am Saturday, spiking homemade signs into the ground before going garage sale mode. By the end of the sale at 4pm, most of my friends were parked in the backyard on lawn chairs, three spaghetts deep. I fell asleep at 10pm, my eyes burning from exhaustion.

Sunday, I biked ~17 miles going from the 2pm Gilmore Girls, but Chicago show at Color Club to the 8pm show at the Empty Bottle (and scarfing down some Parsons in between).

The magic didn’t stop there because, babe, I found my wedding dress on Monday.

I first decided to do The Lizzie McGuire Movie as a stage version in August 2024, sitting next to Brigid at the Empty Bottle before Alex Grelle’s Princess Diana tribute show. I just finished a big piece about DCOM movies for Morning Brew and the preshow music was an amazing blend of Y2K pop hits. This perfect storm made me turn to Brigid and say, “Wow, you know what, we should do The Lizzie McGuire Movie next.” And like she always does, Brigid validated my delusional idea.

If you haven’t read the budget breakdown I did for the show last week, you can find it here.

January 9: Lizzie was my first show really delegating, so I put together a production team of eight people (including myself) and we met to watch the movie and collage some mood boards for the show. Here are some notes from that first meeting and it is lowkirkuinely making me emotional.

I was also applying for a bunch of grants for this show that were all due at the end of January, so it was nice to have some of the early planning done.

May 31: Sage, Brigid, and I met in the park to read through the first draft of the script and cast the show. Sage is such a brilliant joke writer, but she is also seeing things in stories that I miss. I almost cut the entire Ethan character because I couldn’t figure out his deal, Sage stopped me. Thank GOD.

June 26: Production team meeting at Brigid’s apartment.

At Brigid’s suggestion, we went around the table and each shared our top three goals for the show (my favorite tradition!) Everyone had at least one goal that was some version of “not let this show take over my summer.” Almost everyone on the production team had just come off of a project that had severely burned them out, including myself. Our previous show, The Witches of Eastwick, had me holed up in the studio for weeks painting backdrops.

The most helpful thing we did this run as well was outsourcing a lot of the big props (the boombox, camera, vespa, etc). We had seven artists make a prop for the show to free up Annaleigh (production designer) and I’s time to focus on other stuff. It sounds so SIMPLE, but just taking seven props off of our plates made a huge difference.

July 5: Derek broke both of his arms in a bike accident lmao.

July 10: First read through!

July 29: Rehearsals and dance practice starts.

Most scenes got one to two rehearsals and there were rarely rehearsals where we had everyone present, which is just how community theater goes. I build the rehearsal schedule backwards by booking the show dates and one big dress rehearsal. Then I build most of the cast around that. Once the cast is set, I send out a google form asking people’s regular availability and when they have trips planned. Then, I sit down in front of my two monitors with 12,000 spreadsheets open and cobble together a complete rehearsal schedule. 

It sounds wild to plan out a show six to eight months out, but with a cast of ~20 people there is usually only one single weekend June-October where no one has a wedding.

August 30: A full 7-hour Saturday filming spoofs of Express Yourself videos and Mike’s Super Short Show.

We used these videos as transitions during scenes in the live show. This was the kind of day that makes you feel lucky to be making art!!! It was long and exhausting, but I was filming the funniest stuff with my FRIENDS. I cry-laughed close to six times that day. If you’re curious, here’s the planning doc Derek put together for the videos.

September 6: Big dress rehearsal with the band at Color Club (where we did the shows)

I like to do our first big run through three weeks before the actual show. It’s usually chaos, but so helpful for fixing stuff.

September 26 & 27: Two gorgeous sold out shows <3

We will start rehearsals for our run at Steppenwolf in a few weeks, and I’m hearing rumors that almost a third of our tickets are gone for the run, so get them while you can!

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Next Issue: The making of The Lizzie McGuire Movie: The Play part 3. Who knows how many parts I’ll have.

Thanks for reading and, as always, don’t tell me about any typos unless they are really bad.