Haines Elementary School Show
Posted by Dan R on April 10, 2014
With all the firsts (and a few seconds) in this show, it’s time to get excited.
It’s the first school show for BOM Teacher, Ashley Bland. She’s been teaching with us for a while now, but this is her first time on stage with us and she’s doing an incredible job! Here she is with fellow Monkey (and BOM teacher at Haines Elementary), David Pintor:
It’s also the first school show that I have done this school year. It’s exciting to be back in the rehearsal room, reading our students’ stories and working with my fellow Monkeys to adapt those stories for the stage. Being away from the process for a while, it’s easy to forget the scope of kids’ imaginations. In this show, alone, we have international villains, clowns, zombies, scary rabbits, aliens, flower-eating monsters to name, but a few. Sharing a room with performers dedicated to bringing students’ stories is a really exciting process. In the space of 6 hours together, we were able to adapt 18 stories; add to those, a handful of songs and we have our show.
This is the second show that company member Jeff Trainor has directed. He’s doing an incredible job and has joined a growing corps of company members who are taking on directing responsibilities for school shows. It’s a tough job. You have 18 hours to convert a stack of stories to an hour long show. When you consider that most pre-written plays take weeks of rehearsals, you can imagine the amount of focus and hard work needed, as a director, to make sure we’re stage ready, come Friday. He’s ably assisted by a committed and energetic cast.
This is company member Lindsey Dorcus rehearsing one of the stories.
This is also the second year that we’ve been at Haines. It’s always great to come back to a school for another year and we’re excited to be returning there, this Friday, to perform the show.
And that brings me to one more first: Friday will be the first time, ever, that this show has been performed. Now that’s something to get excited about.