Central Alabama Theater looks forward to live performance in 2021-22 season

The theatre, led by Carl Peoples, is also presenting online programming

As summer progresses, and the COVID restrictions continue to lessen, many people are resuming normal routines and feel some optimism about the near future.

Carl Peoples — executive artistic director of Central Alabama Theater in Mountain Brook — is feeling more optimistic as well, but expresses it with dark humor.

“As I told my board of directors and advisory board this week, ‘There’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Lord, I hope it’s not the train,’” he told Village Living recently.

Peoples and the other members of the CAT family of fans, volunteers and supporters  have a lot to feel good about.

CAT, which marked its seventh anniversary in April, has presented entertaining programming online during the pandemic, including the “CAT Cyber Cabaret” series.

Later this summer, CAT will host a fundraiser in person at Topgolf Birmingham, its first live event of any type since February 2020, just before the pandemic.

Best of all, Peoples said the theater plans to resume live performances in October at the Steeple Arts Academy of Dance in Crestline Village.

The live shows this fall should create a lot of excitement, Peoples said.

“The first live show we have will probably feel like a opening on Broadway,” he said. “I feel like we should rent searchlights.”

“People are just bursting at the gut” to get out of the house, Peoples said.

A Gardendale native, Peoples moved back to Birmingham in about 2012 to be closer to his parents after spending 14 years in Los Angeles working in television.

CAT began offering shows in 2014 at The Clubhouse on Highland.

In 2016, the company moved to Crestline in 2016 at the invitation of Deanny Hardy, who runs Steeple Arts.

Mountain Brook has been “a perfect setup” for the Theater, Peoples said.

“You can park at Steeple Arts and go have dinner and come back to the show. It’s easy, accessible.”

The last live show CAT did before the COVID-19 lockdown was a CAT Cabaret on Feb. 8, 2020, that featured acclaimed Broadway composer and conductor Abdul Hamid Royal, known for such hit shows as “Five Guys Named Moe” and “The Gospel at Colonus.”

Peoples adapted to the lockdown by taking CAT into online programming

He began hosting a weekly series of old CAT video clips called “CAT Close-Ups,” in part to give people an escape from the pandemic.

“We learned pretty quickly, and thank goodness I came from the TV world,” he said.

The theatre celebrated its sixth birthday in May 2020 with a star-filled online event called “The Birthday Bash.”

Presented virtually via Facebook Live, the event was a mix of Alabama and national acts, some of whom Peoples met during his years working in show business in New York and Los Angeles.

The 90-minute show included winners of Grammy, Golden Globe and Emmy awards, as well as “American Idol” runner-up and Birmingham native Diana DeGarmo.

The show’s success showed the CAT board a way to continue reaching its audience during the pandemic.

Since then, CAT has presented several other online events under the name ”CAT Cyber Cabaret.” The format includes a 10-15 minute interview with a special guest, who will also perform several songs.

In the September episode, the guest performer was Birmingham native and veteran Broadway actor Jim Newman.

The next CAT Cyber Cabaret took the form of a “huge” show called “The 12 Days of Christmas,” presented from Dec. 13-25.

“Each night was a different performer, and then on Christmas Eve was a culmination of all those performers,” Peoples said.

As a fundraiser, CAT hosted the “Original Art Nutcracker Silent Auction” with 13 visual artists, most of them from Birmingham but some from New York, Nashville and Los Angeles.

“They were original art pieces, so that was a cool way of tying that into the Christmas show,” Peoples said.

The next CAT Cyber Cabaret, which was scheduled to be released in June, featured Royal and used footage shot during his live appearance before the lockdown.

“We also did a live interview with him from his home in Los Angeles,” Peoples said.

CAT is looking forward to its 2021-22 season, which will begin in October, though at press time the schedule has not been finalized.

“We will hopefully have one musical and one play,” Peoples said.

There will also be at least one installment in the theater’s “CAT Scripts” series of play readings.

The theater plans to present five or six live installments of CAT Cabaret, with one in October, Peoples said.

The live cabarets have become the theater’s “signature,” he said.

“Anytime we talk to any patron, the first thing they say is, ‘When are you doing another cabaret?’ he said.

“I think people miss that intimacy,” Peoples said.

The CAT Junior Advisory Board — the theater’s educational arm for teen and young adult performers — will also present a cabaret and may also host a CAT Scripts reading.

CAT will “have some fun with some shows coming up,” he said. “We have some musicals on the horizon that are a lot of fun but are still thought-provoking.”

By 2022, Peoples said that he hopes CAT will be back to ”whatever we call normal, a normal season again.”

The CAT Topgolf Tournament benefit on Thursday, Aug. 12, from 6-10 p.m., will be “our first live anything in a year and a half,” Peoples said.

The benefit will feature dinner, drinks, entertainment and a silent auction, according to an announcement from the theater.

“We thought it was a great way to get everybody back together,” Peoples said. “We wanted to have a gala this last year and didn’t get to, for obvious reasons.”

The event is largely outdoors, and people can have 4-6 people in their own group or pod, he said.

Peoples is anxious to bring back live audiences to Steeple Arts “and have that exchange of energy, which theatre is all about,” he said.

Moving forward, CAT is “probably going to be a little more obvious with some emotional theatre, and I mean that as a positive thing — making people feel things from the pieces that we do,” Peoples said.

“As a theater, that is our job,” he said.

Theater is also “about starting conversations — not just coming in and sitting in the theater but going across the street and having an appetizer or a drink talking about what we saw and how does that relate to our real life, or sometimes just how funny it was,” Peoples said.

“If we can make people leave the theatre and have a conversation about that, that is where we want to head as we move forward in our seventh and eight seasons,” he said.

For more information, call 888-870-2477 or go to centralalabamatheater.org or Facebook @CentralAlabamaTheatre.

To order tickets, go to eventbrite.com and search for “CAT TopGolf Tournament.”