The Spring Theater Calendar is Full at DMPS
Findley Elementary School performed Sleeping Beauty on stage at North High School, one of dozens of plays and musicals being performed by students across all grade levels this spring.
Spring has always been an artsy time of year in the district. End-of-year concerts for bands and orchestras and choirs ring out like heralds for the coming summer and proof of another year’s growth and development. Portfolios burst at their seams with visual creations.
But this spring is overflowing with theatrics.
Last month North High’s production of SHREK: The Musical was a smashing success. Then Roosevelt, apropos of its location, treated audiences to a rousing rendition of 42nd Street. And this weekend Lincoln High is staging, fittingly, Disney’s High School Musical, while East offers Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Next weekend Hoover presents the mystery/comedy A Haunting We Will Go.
Beneath the “spring stock” season for the high school drama departments, the district’s dramatic repertoire has added a layer of understudy in recent years.
The Turnaround Arts cohort of schools in the North feeder pattern have established drama departments of their own and they are functioning now as a sort of off-Broadway proving ground for budding thespians.
Last month Madison Elementary staged Disney’s Aladdin at Harding Middle School and this week Findley Elementary’s production of Sleeping Beauty and Oak Park’s The Music Man both open at North.
Harding earlier wowed audiences with Willy Wonka and Cattell’s The Lion King premieres Thursday night on the school’s own stage.
We sneaked a peek at Wednesday morning’s performance of Sleeping Beauty.
If you have a chance to catch the Thursday night show at 6:30 at North, don’t miss it, unless it’s because you’re attending one of the other school shows around town.
Jane Olson is a 38-year veteran music teacher at Findley and directed the Opening Morning debut on Wednesday. Just prior to curtain time, she paused in last minute preparations to put the drama program at Findley into perspective.
“Our first show was The Jungle Book five years ago. This spring, students from the cast of that show were playing roles here at North in SHREK,” she said. “Kids were coming up to me to say that I was their music teacher way back in kindergarten. They’ve grown so much, but of course I remembered them all.”
Of course. Those first tentative steps of choreography; first hesitant lines of memorized dialogue; first bows and curtain calls; first spell-breaking kisses; first dragons slayed – they’re memorable.
Backstage the cast was in costumes that included crowns and suits of armor and fairy wings, finishing a final run-through while their classmates in grades K-3 bounced off buses and into their seats for an exclusive showing. Lack of rank had its privilege here as the front rows were reserved for kindergarteners because there would be no trouble seeing over them.
The lights dimmed, the music came up and Olson waved her arms like two of the magic wands featured in the story.
Maleficent was magnificient, ordering her grinning minions, the goons, to do her dirty work and firing special effects from her raven-tipped scepter. The prince was indeed both charming and handsome, and the object of his affections truly a beauty, especially awake.
Fourth and fifth graders grew into their roles right before the audience’s eyes and as the title character’s pivotal 16th birthday approached, it was easy to project several years ahead into the futures of the novices on stage and imagine them at 16, hitting their dramatic strides as the plots of their real lives thicken.
There’s nothing like live theater. You think you know a classic storyline like the one that plays out in Sleeping Beauty. But Wednesday morning’s rendition raised a question: If a prop tree or two falls on the set and the topplings aren’t in the script, do they make a sound? Not when they’re fashioned from cardboard and no one misses a beat in the action that swirls around them.
All the district’s a stage and the students…players it seems this spring, to paraphrase one of Shakespeare’s oft-quoted monologues. “…the whining schoolboy, with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school.”
Until he’s old enough for Drama Club and auditions are announced.
