Gearing Up for Summer Theatre

    Jean Tarbett Hardiman filed a great story in the Herald-Dispatch this weekend profiling Mary Smirl, the co-director of this summer's offering from HART: Disney's Beauty and the Beast.'

   You can read the story right here - here's an excerpt:

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Mary Smirl's husband, Tommy, sometimes wonders how many successful young adults are walking around this world having once played an inanimate object in one of his wife's plays. It's probably quite a few.

A longtime children's theater director in Huntington, Mary Smirl never did like leaving out children who had auditioned. She would sit up all hours of the night thinking about how to squeeze one more child into the cast of a show, even if there was no speaking and very little movement involved in the role.

"We always gave them names, because they're kids, and you want to look at a kid and hear them say, 'I'm Soap!' " she said, adding that kids usually make the most of their parts, big and small. "Some of our best kids started out as a tree. A tree is a good place to start."

This year, that tendency will reveal itself in a few extra dinner table items dancing in "Be Our Guest," as Smirl and husband Tommy co-direct Beauty and the Beast with another theater veteran, Angie Jolicoeur. The production will be part of the fourth summer for Huntington Area Regional Theatre, or HART in the Park.