The company began 2005 with a 10-show, four-community winter tour of Renfrew County with a newly developed, full-length show called Looking Back at Mac, by Ish Theilheimer. This show essentially adds a first act to ON THE AIR with Mac’s Melodiers and is more biographical as a result. The tour was sponsored by Renfrew County Community Futures Development Corporation and had a specific focus on youth, with five youth in the cast and one backstage.
All performances took place in high school auditoriums and featured cameo performances by local students and teachers. In three of the schools, students did dramatic productions specially for the tour and, in one case, wrote an original script.
Stone Fence’s summer and fall schedule included 34 performances of two shows: Al Capone’s Hideout, a locally-written musical comedy about when gangster Al Capone hid out near the Ottawa Valley town of Quadeville in the 1940s, and eight performances in August of Looking Back at Mac. Director Barry Goldie was a co-author of Al Capone’s Hideout and led its development process in 1992 with Stone Fence’s predecessor company, Upper Madawaska Theatre.