70’s & 80’s

In the ’70’s the big Broadway musicals were introduced into the Players repertoire with shows like “Annie Get Your Gun”, “Oklahoma!”, “Carousel”, “South Pacific”, “Hello Dolly” and “Calamity Jane” being successfully presented on the Parish Hall stage. For 26 years all our main productions had been at St Mary’s Parish Hall, but our 1985 production of “Showboat” proved to be the last to be performed there. The Hall’s sudden totally unexpected closure resulted in the biggest upheaval in the club’s history.

We lost our performance venue, rehearsal base and clubrooms virtually overnight. We were, in effect, homeless.

Our move to the Redgrave Theatre in Clifton at last gave us a chance to perform in a real theatre and, following an uncertain few months in the church vestry and Purdown Hospital, a new base was established at the Page Community Association premises at Staple Hill in Bristol, where we have remained ever since.

The down side of the move was that the Redgrave Theatre was on the other side of the city, which meant that inevitably we lost a good proportion of the audiences who had supported us for years at Fishponds.

Nevertheless, the club continued to function successfully and we have enjoyed working and progressing under the leadership of a wide selection of talented Directors, Musical Directors and Choreographers at our present home at Page Community Association