‘Quality production’ opens Saturday
Published 10:45 pm Friday, September 17, 2010
BIRMINGHAM — Marc Raby wanted to bring his play to Selma, just because it’s Selma.
And Saturday at 7 p.m., Raby’s wish will come true as the curtain goes up in Pickard Auditorium on “He’s Not The Man I Married!”
“I had a desire to come to the Black Belt,” Raby said in a telephone interview Friday. “That area doesn’t really get quality productions.”
Raby adapted the stage play from his novella “Love and Insecurity,” which was released last summer.
“The show is about two people who have been friends for a long time,” he said. “They married their husbands at the same time, and one of the friends measures her success by the other.”
One of the friends gets a divorce and feels like a failure, so she tries to make everyone around her miserable because she’s miserable.”
The play stars Chico DeBarge, the younger brother of the Motown family act DeBarge, popular in the mid-1980s.
Felicity Blunt, the stage manager, returns home in this production. She grew up in Selma; her parents still live here. Blunt graduated from Selma High School in 1995.
“I’ve been singing, acting in theater pretty much all of my life,” Blunt said.
Raby asked her to work on the play. “This is not my first experience,” she said.
But coming home again, setting the stage and seeing friends and family — “I’m looking forward to it,” she said. “I’ve made many, many calls to friends.”
Tickets are $20 and available at Calhoun Foods.