Ned Donovan - Ithaca ‘12

Hi everyone,

So I have been in rehearsals for the past few weeks for A Year with Frog and Toad at the Maine State Music Theater in Brunswick Maine.  Myself, three other local performers, and four of the performance interns at MSMT have been working to get the show up and running.  

The cast includes: Brian Kess (University of Minnesota Duluth ‘10) as Frog, Matt Geller (University of Northern Kentucky ‘10) as Toad, Ephie Aardema (Circle in the Square ‘09) as a Bird/Mole, Kaitlyn Johnson (Muhlenberg College ‘08) as Bird/Mole, Joe Valliere (University of Southern Maine ‘10) as Bird/Mole, Ned Donovan (Ithaca College ‘12) as Snail, and local Middle School standouts Rebekah and Blair as Mouse/Squirrel, and Turtle/Squirrel respectively.  The whole thing is directed by Connie Shafer and Music Directed by Sam Bagala.  

This adorable and fun show follows Frog and Toad from the day the wake up from hibernation, through the four seasons until the day they go back to sleep.  Over the course of the year they break clocks, talk about mail, go swimming (where all the animals find out that “Toad looks funny in a bathing suit”), bake Cookies, go sledding, and more.  

The show is fun, quirky, and is sure to be a hit in the children’s show line-up this summer at MSMT.

Hey everyone,

So on April 22, we put on the freshman cabaret here at Ithaca College. Despite a few complications and scheduling issues we got it off the ground and running. We did songs from shows such as: Spring Awakening, All Shook up, The Drowsy Chaperone, as well as standards such as “I’m a Woman” by Lieber and Stoller. All in all I think it went pretty well, there were some minor problems but such things happen in a cabaret.

Thanks to everyone who got involved, and all the people who stuck it out despite scheduling conflicts, and to all of you who couldn’t be a part in this but wanted to, I’m sorry that we couldn’t make it. Thanks to Mitchell Murdock for filming the affair and editing it together. Thanks to Jen Shaw and Lucy Gram for Stage Managing and helping me get everything together. Thanks to the School of Music for the use of Presser Hall. Thanks to Laura Intravia and Omar Najimi for playing for us and being flexible about what songs were in it (many of them got added the day before). Thanks to my lovely girlfriend Nicole who put up with me through random rehearsal times and barely got to see me.

Hey everyone,

The title of the post says it all.  I’m thoroughly at a loss while at home, so I’m hitting the job search hard so as maybe to distract myself from having nothing to do.  On Tuesday I go into rehearsals for “A Year With Frog and Toad” at the Maine State Music Theater, so that will be a good start to filling my time.  The roles are uncast as of yet, because it’s going to be cast internally from the cast members they have, so I will post later on roles and whatnot.  I have a lot of possible things I’m doing, but it all hinges on how well I can schedule them.  I’ve tried my hand at dishwashing at the Dogfish Cafe in downtown Portland, and hopefully that goes well and I can continue there.  I’ve applied at a few other restaurants and hotels in Portland, so now the waiting game begins.  I also will probably be doing some odds and ends jobs at Waynflete School (my old high school) for the maintenance crew, which will be fun.  All in all my summer looks a little packed jobwise.

Other things I might be doing.

The school year is over.  It’s weird to look back and think that I have completed one quarter of my time in college.  Weirder still to think that I only have three more years of schooling to go (that is unless my life plan changes drastically and I head off to grad school).  It’s amazing to me that this year has actually happened, that my life has actually been altered in the way it has.  Over the next week or so I’ll be posting on my experiences in the last 3 weeks, from review to getting ready to leave.  I won’t do it in one long post, that just seems silly.  All I will say about review, however, is that I got what I expected, and I am continuing as a Musical Theatre major for now, as always I will have to work as hard as I possibly can in order to remain in the program, but that is true for everyone, not just me.  In this post I want to talk a bit about an experience I had right at the end of the year, on the last night that Dillingham was open to students.