The Pitch Pipe - January 2009 - (Page 9) package: “shift happens.” She has the job permanently now, Carol Ann said. Great packages like Spirit’s are a process of trial and error, and require large doses of teamwork and patience. Just a couple of weeks before leaving for Hawaii, Spirit abandoned a significant part of its costume. “Originally we were going to have dog masks, and we worked with them but realized they compromised the sound,” Carol Ann said. “Two weeks before International we created the face-painting team. (On the day of the finals) it took about an hour to paint all the faces. “We found that when people had their faces painted and their dog costumes on, they lost their inhibitions,” she said. “We decided, ‘OK, from now on we’re always going to be in costume.’ ” Carol Ann admits she won’t be asking to wear another fur-laden costume under hot stage lights again in the near future. “It was the hottest costume I’ve ever been in on stage,” she laughed. “I put it on at the last minute. Mine was a beautiful golden retriever and it weighed about 25 pounds. When I took my headpiece off, I could shake my hair and sweat just flew off.” Unlike the meticulous, lengthy planning that supports Spirit of the Gulf’s performance packages, CAPRI’s sprang from the panic of a rapidly approaching deadline. Add a ukulele-playing bass and two sisters who already own fat suits, and you’ve got Sweet Adelines’ first back-toback audience favorite winners. CAPRI, which won the award with its charming “Singing in the Bathtub” routine in 2007, had the audience on its side all the way with its hula performance package. While Spirit of the Gulf honed its package for around 18 months, bass Maggie Butts said CAPRI’s evolved less than six months before it was performed in Hawaii. “It started with the fact that we knew we were going to Hawaii,” Maggie said. “The girls (lead Jen Kuethe and tenor Nancy Disney) were already familiar with the song Ukulele Lady. Their mother had it on a Bette Midler CD (“Bathhouse Betty,” 1998). They thought, ‘Hmm, Maggie can play the ukulele …“ CAPRI’s package rounded into shape fairly quickly as the quartet applied its philosophy of entertainment to the task of competing at the highest level of Sweet Adelines competition. “This is what we like to do, absolutely,” Maggie said. “We’ve always thought the little one-liners in between (songs) are not enough. Audiences want to be entertained. When they see choruses they see entertainment. But when you see quartets, you don’t get a lot. You get jokes, but they’re usually old. So we wanted to do something that would be really entertaining. We wanted to take advantage of the fact that you could bring props and actually entertain an audience.” Entertain they did. After dazzling the crowd and judges alike with their competition songs, It’s The Girl and I Had The Craziest Dream, Maggie whipped out her ukulele. Baritone Kate Mannherz did a quick change into lovely hula girl as Jen and Nancy slipped offstage and into inflatable ballerina/hula girl costumes that rendered both women, well, huge. As Maggie and Kate performed, Jen and Nancy bounded back onstage, their heads popping out of the tops of the suits like knots on the end of a balloon. The audience was hooked. The logistics involved with turning inflatable ballerina Halloween costumes into zaftig hula girls used every ounce of their creative energy. “We had to use table grass skirts to be able to sew them onto the tutu portion of the fat suits,” Maggie said. “After that, there was just enough left over to fit Kate. We had to make the talking last enough to cover them changing. The fat suits have battery-operated fans inside to blow them up, so we had to make sure we had good batteries. It wouldn’t have been too good to have them deflate onstage.” The result left onlookers with no doubt of who would take home the honors in 2008. And now that they’ve won twice, the members of CAPRI would like to pick up the trifecta. “Having won the audience award (in 2007), we wanted to try to outdo ourselves,” Maggie said. “We do want to stay outside the box, and I think audience appreciation really is more important to us than winning the contest. Don’t get me wrong, we want to win and we’re working on that part, too. “Mistakes or no mistakes, it was fun; really fun,” Maggie said. “There are always mistakes, but they fall into the dim recesses of your memory when you realize how much you were appreciated by your audience.” January 2009 9
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