I only attended the construction classes, so I can not speak to the performance. I wouldn't take a class from them again, but that's because my previous experience was mostly negative.

I missed this when it was posted the first time around, but had some thoughts:

Interesting about the liability waivers - is that a common thing over there for classes, because if I had to sign one over here it would suggest to me the organisers haven't bothered to purchase public liability insurance?

And about the girl helping out, to be fair I've done plenty of volunteer work for theatre companies and it sounds about right. Quite often the volunteers get shunted about doing random stuff and when there's enough time you may get to do something 'useful'. I can recall my work experience with a local company where most of it was spent making phone calls, cleaning the storage space, etc - and on one day I was 'lucky' and got to sit in on a rehearsal for a new show they were producing. Sitting in was literally that, they didn't have anything useful for me to do during the rehearsals.

As for having to pay full price even though she's volunteering, I know a few local people who would have the same attitude: mostly because classes are so expensive to run that even one discount means losing money.

Not giving a refund would depend entirely on their policies. In many cases people have a "if you don't cancel with 48 hours notice, no refunds" policy. If they don't have clear terms and conditions, yeah it sounds pretty dodgy.

I'm not defending these guys, just playing devil's advocate. It sounds a lot like they had a teacher pull out really suddenly and don't have a contingency plan properly worked out to deal with it. Except for the materials which sounds like they're not making enough money to put it back into the classes. (This is also a great example why I don't bother trying to do real world classes anymore - there's so much work going into it and so much can go wrong)

I too have heard good stuff about these classes, so I'm disappointed to hear you didn't have a good time.

Hi, I live in Norway, and I'm planning on going over to attend the puppet performance classes they have. Do you know anything about these, or did you only attend the puppet making classes?

Stian Presthus.

Travelling all the way from Norway for puppet classes? That seems like a long way to go...