Today we’d like to introduce you to Summer Blinco and Jordan Hall Campbell.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
We met one December day at a Little Women audition, introduced by a mutual friend. Six months later, we traveled to New York City for a week-long Broadway trip. The scheme to start a theatre company was hatched in the long line at the San Diego airport. We had a name, we sketched our first logo, and we had a vision for what the company would be. Over the next year, we put on a few small fundraiser shows, tried to navigate the logistics of starting a company, and built up our actor base. We fell into our niche a little by surprise.
Our first big show we performed for the 2015 San Diego International Fringe Festival was a movie-musical mash up titled “Les Midge” (a mash up of The Hobbit movies and Les Miserables). The show was written by our friends Eric Phillips and Robbie X Pierce, and we suddenly found ourselves with a small following of fans who loved the comedic concepts we were able to bring to the stage through that show. We decided we wanted to pursue this route of theatre further and brought our first internally written mash up to the Fringe Festival in 2016. “The Phantom of the Empire: Return of the Opera” is the mash up of the original Star Wars trilogy and The Phantom of the Opera, and it has proved to be our biggest hit yet.
In 2016, we also started putting on our mash ups during San Diego Comic Con, performing downtown to draw the biggest crowds. We followed up in 2017 with the Walking Dead and Into the Woods mash up, “Into the Walker Woods”, which also hit it big with audiences at both Fringe and Comic Con. Going into 2018, we are in full prep mode for our newest project, “Wicked Wizards: A Potter Parody”, a mash up of Wicked and Harry Potter (all 7 books). We’re still growing and we’re having a great time just creating theatre and building relationships with our actors!
Has it been a smooth road?
Definitely not. We’ve had every kind of struggle you could think of. Financial woes, writing blocks, losing venues last minute, losing actors, etc. One especially stressful situation happened in the fall of 2016 when we produced a “mix-tape” type of show for Halloween, entitled Musical Haunts. This show combined popular songs all themed around Halloween (Thriller, Monster Mash, Grim Grinning Ghosts, and so on); telling the story of a group of people stuck in a haunted house and forced by ghosts to sing and dance for their freedom. It was our first attempt at an original story (rather than a mash up of two existing properties), and so it already had a higher stress level for our creative and production team going in. It was also a one-night event, so the pressure was on to get it perfect right off the bat. A few days before we opened, one of our critical cast and production team members was in a serious accident, and while she really tried to recover in time to do the show, the decision was made eight hours before curtain that she couldn’t go on. I think over the next few hours, we all wanted to kill each other at some point, but as a team, we pulled together and rewrote the entire show to work without that character. All of this was accomplished amid major technical issues and very little time in our venue.
Looking back though, we all laugh at how crazy that experience was, and it was a really good learning experience on how to plan for the worst and hope for the best (our unofficial team motto)! What we love about our team is how everyone pulls together in times of trial to make it so the show can go on no matter what (including the cast member who was majorly injured, but still showed up the day of the show with cookies for concessions, and costumes in hand).
So, as you know, we’re impressed with Turning Tydes Theatre Company – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
We are a small start-up theatre company, “turning mainstream on its side”. Our mission is to create unique entertainment with familiar feelings. We’ve been producing shows for the past three years, striving to breakaway from routine theater productions and provide a fresh genre of performing arts that strikes curiosity and wonder into the hearts and minds of our audiences. Bringing the San Diego community such works as “The Phantom of the Empire” and “Into the Walker Woods”, award-winning movie/musical mash-ups; and the “Diamond In the Rough” cabaret series, which features the best music from the flops of Broadway.
We are known for our mash ups most of all. We have a DIY kind of aesthetic that we leverage for comedy, and really no idea is too ridiculous. Making the Deathstar a ballerina dancing on point…. wearing a stuffed exercise ball…for instance. We make good use of bad puns and sarcastic comments, and are not above pandering to our audiences. I think our fans like us because we bring a fresh spin to what they already know and love.
Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
We love that people are so willing to try new things! We fell in love with the Fringe Festival because of the freedom of artistic expression that is so prevalent in every show exhibited there. And the audiences are so generous and enthusiastic. We love it when people can roll with us and embrace our crazy! As far as what we like least…. Well…. Traffic getting from Oceanside to Downtown is awful!
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.turningtydes.org
- Email: turningtydes@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/turningtydes/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TurningTydes
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/turningtydes
Image Credit:
A.M Photography
Getting in touch: SDVoyager is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
