Christy Eaglesham, operator of the youth drama program Christy’s Stage Door, finds a home inside the Southampton Town Hall and will run youth classes from October to May with a final performance June 1.

Hub Staff

The Southampton Town Hall will now showcase theatre year-round as it hosts Christy’s Stage Door, a youth theatre company operating from October to June for actors and actors-to-be ages 8 to 13 years.

The program run my longtime Southampton resident Christy Eagelsham, whose 30 years of acting experience saw her travel and perform around Canada and the world, will culminate in two year-end performances of a musical review with dramatic scenes and monologues chosen from popular plays.

“Everybody will be on stage, everyone will have lines to speak and everybody will be in the songs they sing and learn choreography and movement,” said Eagelsham September 27. “Nobody will be tree holder number one, everybody will be involved," she said.

Eagelsham began training youth in the theatre world when her daughter showed an interest after watching her perform and in the early 2000s Christy’s Stage Door was born. “Kids are like sponges with information, especially if they're interested creatively. If you open the door and just welcome them in they will run with it. It’s magical, theatre is, so I want to make that available in this community in ways it wasn't when I was here," she said.

The youth program which begins in October has room for a few more registrants and will take place on Thursdays from 5 to 7 p.m., with expanded hours in May leading up to the performance.

“I run my program like it’s a professional experience,” said the actor, who takes her years of experience to teach the class acting and singing techniques and also teaches what goes on backstage and behind the scenes of a standard theatre experience. “It’s all of the skills, the steps, the training, that’s involved in teaching them how to do what they're doing...and I cater it to the level of knowledge and experience and training that they may have already had.”

Eaglesham hopes to also find an acting “intern”, preferably a senior high school student or adult with a love of drama and a want to explore musical theatre, to assist in the Christy’s Stage Door experience. The volunteer would need to have a grasp of acting techniques that they could help teach to groups of students and experience in backstage efforts would be helpful.

The program will run in semester fashion with a cost of $225 from October to January classes and $325 for February to June for the extended hours.

For more information contact Christy at christystagedoor@rogers.com or call 519-797-3469.

Throughout her 30 years of experience Eaglesham has played a host of characters. On the left, Eagelsham as Mama Rose in Gypsy at the Roxy Theatre around 2004. On the right, Eaglesham when she performed in the early 1990s on a Royal Caribbean cruise ship.