Author: robert_wade@outlook.com

Earlier this year, The Upstagers–the award-winning community theater group based in Del Rio, Texas–lost its founder, Fred Brockwell. Although he had moved out of the state several years ago to be closer to family and enjoy retirement, he visited his home town once in a while and even returned in 2017 to direct a revival of “Pump Boys and Dinettes”, featuring our original cast. But along with losing Fred, The Upstagers also lost our home venue, The Paul Poag Theatre for the Performing Arts.

After a series of storms and related damage, coupled with years of neglect by the City of Del Rio, the theater was found to have such substantial damage that it was rendered unusable. All told, we’re talking around $2 million in repairs and upgrades needed. Thus, The Upstagers has had it’s 2023 season completely upended, and we’ve been seeking venues that we can actually produce shows in. The biggest limitation is the fact that we an build sets in the Paul Poag, whereas no place we’ve found so far can afford us the opportunity of a multi-week set build. We have to build smaller, portable sets and transport them—definitely not optimal, given how involved most of our sets tend to me (something we’ve become well know for).

So, whereas our original plan for a fall show was “The Play That Goes Wrong” (a huge, intensely complex set), we have since replaced it with a musical revue, “The Upstagers At The Movies”. This will allow us to incorporate a fairly substantial cast with very minimal set requirements. The show will feature iconic songs from or made popular by movies over the years, and will feature a combination of choreography by our own Annie Marshall, individual performing talent and much of the music provided by my band, Accidental Drama (named independently of any affiliation with theater, but very appropriate as a team-up with The Upstagers). So, work begins on casting and rehearsals for a November opening (venues still to be determined at the time of this writing).

30 Years Later…

In the 80’s, it was Caught in the Act. In the 90’s, it was Red Handed. After that band “retired”, I thought I was done playing in a live band. Then, in 2019, I was approached by one of the founders of both CITA and RH about sitting in on a rehearsal he was involved in. When I walked into their practice room, I saw familiar faces.

The situation? These four guys–three guitarists and a drummer–had gone to school together and were gearing up for their class reunion. The plan was to put together a couple of sets for the occasion. Now, most of them had either played together in school or in previous professional bands, and over the years I’d often remarked that I’d love to get every musician who’d every played together from the Del Rio area and have a one-night-only all-star band gig. Even given that wish, I felt odd being asked to play with them for their reunion when I didn’t go to school here, much less graduate with these guys. However, they were dead-set on having me play with them, so I was in.

Tragedy would strike the ground on that New Year’s Eve, when Gary Stone passed away unexpectedly. Undaunted, the remaining members decided to press on, knowing that’s what Gary would have wanted. When the group had three guitarists, having one of them switch out to bass guitar as each song dictated wasn’t a challenge. But, now? That’s when I reached out to Tom, who’d I’d work with before in a church band, and he was excited to try something new. Thus, the current lineup was established: Louis DeRango on drums, Mickey Hunkin and Gilbert Rodrigues on guitar, Tom Jones on bass, and me on keys.

Hard work ensued, songs were chosen, friends and other musicians were invited to watch a practice session or two just so we could gauge how we were progressing. Much to our surprise, we were asked to headline a huge celebration the city was putting on in order to welcome The Thunderbirds to the area for the air show at Laughlin Air Force Base. We kicked things into high gear in order to be ready for our first gig in public.

Then COVID struck.

Just a couple of days out, and the world went to sleep. It came to a standstill. Maybe we wouldn’t be able to play, maybe the class reunion that spawned the group was cancelled, but–shutdowns be damned–we continued rehearsing, albeit covertly. We added more music. A lot of music. We came up with a name for the band. By 2021, when the world figured out it hadn’t ended, we had 70 songs in our repertoire. And we started gigging.

So, here we are. Some guys who thought we were pretty much done with playing in a band, together with guys who never thought they would be in a band, enjoying playing a lot of music we used to play when they were considered Top 40…and are now “classic”. It’s a different dynamic, playing and performing now compared to then. Not so much ego. It’s nice.

Ah, yes, those early years. Well, not all that early. 1988, if we’re picking nits. There was a local Top 40 cover band called Caught in the Act that I was fortunate enough to get invited to join in 1985. At the time I didn’t really have much live band experienced and, honestly, you couldn’t really call me a keyboardist. In fact, I was a far better drummer than keyboardist, and a far better vocalist than musician. By the time I really got down to seriously working with the band, we were gearing up for the 1988 Battle of the Bands in Del Rio, Texas. And you can tell, it was absolutely indicative of the 80’s. Performing with Hector, Cindy, Jimmy and Mickie was tremendous fun and we did, in fact win the competition. We went on to play a few times in the area before we ran into a couple of lineup changes.

I’ll be honest with you. WordPress isn’t what I’d call user-friendly. Or, more precisely, it’s not this person’s idea of user-friendly. Seriously, the kind of “flexibility” that WordPress sites afford actually requires you to do a lot more work, because templates are all over the map. And, frustratingly, there’s a whole lot of bait and switch going on with template creators. They show off a really cool template, one that seems perfect for your site concept. Then, you download and install it, only to find that so much of it is extremely limited and behind a paywall. Not cool, kids, not cool at all.

What got us to this point was the fact that we broke down and used one of those pay-to-play template sites. Then the template we used made such a mess of our site data that it was impossible to go to a free template. The data and database was utterly destroyed. The reason we moved off of hosting our own webserver was to reduce the overhead, the work involved in maintaining it. Sadly, we’ve found that to be anything but the case.

The template we’re using now seems to be putting us right back into the same trap. What seem to be very basic functions to customize are completely behind a paywall. We’ll have to see how long we stick with this. But for now, here we are, rebuilding the site from scratch.

Wish us luck!