Casting for the September production was during the weekend of April 13-14, when director Giles Burton flew in to help select the cast before flying out to Prague.
The 49-year-old director, a British citizen with permanent New Zealand residency, was hand-picked by Remarkable Theatre and comes with an impressive CV containing festival and related work in Prague, Scotland, the United Kingdom, Georgia and Hong Kong.
Tim Firth, the writer of Calendar Girls, calls the ''nudity'' scene ''fabulous concealment'' and Burton adds ''everybody knows it's safe; it's the sort of play you can take your grandmother to''.
''There is the whole kind of idea of nudity in it, but it's never seen ... the whole point of it is you don't reveal anything.''
Burton said he had been involved ''with everything from comedy to Shakespeare, modern plays and very heavy and serious plays ... but I suppose the closest thing I have done to this is Oscar Wilde.''
Like Oscar Wilde's plays, Calendar Girls was cleverly worded and often had a lot of meaning underneath, he said.
''When I was thinking of applying [to be director], I went away and I looked at the film and realised there was a lot in there ... this actually has a lot of meat in it, these relationships and the fact that they do fall apart.''
Burton promises the show will be a crowd-pleaser, saying the most important people involved are in the audience, as they have paid to watch the play.
As he is British, the original British humour of the story would be an element he could get right, because Calendar Girls was also a very funny story.
The choice to perform Calendar Girls was made by Remarkable Theatre and Burton said the rights for theatre companies to perform the play had only recently been released.
Burton has been busy preparing for this month's Prague Fringe Festival, of which he is the technical director. After Calendar Girls, he has a project in Nelson.
