The ’80s have invaded, as have some small, furry-toed creatures, a fearsome pirate and a bunch of murder suspects. The newsboys are on strike, Wednesday Addams is in love with a regular boy and soon, three ghosts will pay Scrooge a visit.
It’s high school theater season in the Upper Valley, and this year’s lineup of school and community productions promises escapism of every flavor, with an emphasis on mischievous fun.
The Mascoma Players of Mascoma Valley Regional High School are busy sharpening their sword-fighting skills for their production of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. The stage adaptation of the beloved children’s classic, playing in the high school auditorium on Friday and Saturday at 7 p.m. (tickets, $5 at the door), offers plenty of physical theater, which appealed to the cast members who had been part of last year’s Treasure Island.
“I always wait to see who wants to be part of the show before I pick one,” said director David Wilson.
Cast members will have to be quick on their feet for another reason, too. Most of them are playing multiple characters. To simplify costume changes and heighten the sense of fantasy, Wilson commissioned a professional mask maker to create dwarf and goblin masks. The art department is making a giant dragon.
Another aspect of The Hobbit that Wilson appreciates is its lack of rigid gender roles. Most of the parts can be played by either boys or girls without giving audience members pause, he said.
And, The Hobbit has widespread appeal. “It’s good theater for the whole family,” Wilson said.
Speaking of families, The Addams Family is coming to the Hartford High School stage the weekend of Nov. 8- 10. The new musical comedy has the familiar characters from the original TV series straining to keep their peculiarities under wraps when Wednesday Addams, now grown up, brings her new boyfriend and his very normal family home to dinner.
“The kids are having a lot of fun with it,” said music director Andrea Nardone.
Along with exploring a theme that most people can relate to (especially with the holiday family dinners approaching), the musical is packed with humor that appeals on different levels to different demographics and the crew is working hard to make sure the characters meet audience expectations.
“The hard thing about this show is that they’re characters people are familiar with,” Nardone said. “Morticia has black hair. Everyone knows that. Fester has to be bald.”
In other ways, however, Hartford High has been able to put its own twist on the show. For one thing, there will be a crypt on stage, said Nardone, whose husband, Brycen Nardone, is building the set.
Nardone, who is new to the theater department this year, also loves the way director Lanni Luce West has expanded and enhanced the ensemble so that it plays a key role in the show. Each ensemble member is a family ancestor, and each one has created his or her own backstory, she said.
The Addams Family takes the stage Nov. 8 and 9 at 7 p.m. and Nov. 10 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $10 for adults and $7 for students and seniors and can be purchased at www.hhsvt.com/news/827/70/Addams-Family-Tickets.
Meanwhile, another finger-snapping show is shaping up at Hanover High School. On the weekend of Nov. 7-9, the Hanover High Footlighters will bring Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona several hundred years into the future. An on-stage band will play favorite tunes from the ’80s as Proteus and Valentine’s adventures unfold.
“The show is about young people leaving home for the first time, and all of the discoveries that they make and all the mistakes they make,” said director Amanda Rafuse. “It made me think of John Hughes’ films, as a child of the ’80s.”
The show will include 13 ’80s era hits from bands ranging from the Violent Femmes to Roxette, said Rafuse, and the band’s onstage presence gives the show a burst of energy.
Rafuse said she was surprised by how enthusiastic the students were about choosing ’80s music for the show and how many songs they were familiar with.
“The ’80s have made a massive comeback,” she said.
Two Gentleman of Verona takes the stage Nov. 7, 8, and 9 at 7 p.m. Tickets are $8 ($5 students/seniors/staff).
The show will end with a rousing rendition of Kim Wilde’s Kids in America.
Good luck keeping 40-somethings in their seats.
While the Footlighters are putting their band in the spotlight, Stevens High School in Claremont is giving its crew a chance to shine. The theater department is presenting Peter and the Starcatcher Nov. 15 and 16 at 7 p.m. and Nov. 17 at 2 p.m. (tickets $7, $5 students/seniors). The play, which is based on the bestselling Peter Pan prequel of the same name, takes place on a ship and an exotic island, giving the tech crew a lot of interesting challenges, said director Victor Toman.
“It’s very visual. … We built a lot of platforms and a lot of other things like palm trees and tropical plants,” said Toman, who also teaches theater classes, including a technical theater course, at the high school.
Toman is new to the school this year and said he’s pleasantly surprised by the emphasis the school puts on theater.
“They have a really robust theater program,” he said. “It’s not necessarily something you’d find at a lot of high schools.”
Along with an eye-popping set, the show promises a lot of laughs and a feel-good plot, Toman said.
“The thing that’s really great about the play is the characters are really vivid and funny, and the dialogue is really snappy,” he said. “It’s kind of fun for the audience to go on this journey of what happened before Peter Pan starts. … There’s magic, there’s great themes about friendship and love and what those things mean.”
As Stevens High School revisits a childhood tale, the Rivendell Academy Players will take audiences inside a favorite childhood game. Clue: Onstage comes to Rivendell Academy in Orford on Nov. 7, 8, and 9 at 7 p.m. (Tickets $12, $5 students, free for veterans).
“Basically it’s a sort of murder mystery whodunnit,” said director Anna Alden. “All of the characters are invited to Body Manor, and they are all being blackmailed by someone, but they don’t know who it is.”
As the plot thickens, characters announce their guesses about who committed the murder where and with what weapon in true Clue fashion.
“It’s a fun show. I feel like it has every gag you can think of,” Alden said. “There will be a lot of surprises.”
No one will be surprised to see Charlie Brown land on his back when Lucy grabs the football he’s trying to kick, in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, playing Nov. 7-10 at the Artistree Grange Theatre in Pomfret. The classic show, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, is based on the cherished Charles Schultz comic strip. The community theater group includes high school students from around the area. Show times are Nov. 7 and 8 at 7:30 p.m., Nov. 9 at 3 and 7:30 p.m. and Nov. 10 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $20-25 and can be purchased at artistreevt.org/youre-a-good-man-charlie-brown.html
While many theater groups are banking on nostalgia to bring in audiences, the drama department at Oxbow High School in Bradford, Vt., is taking a different tack. They’ll present an original musical, Hometown Hospital, on Saturday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. (tickets $5, free for students).
Written by Oxbow High English teacher Ted Pogacar and science teacher Lisa Jones, the production tells the story of a nurse pining for a doctor, a doctor battling an illness of his own and a strange mystery involving stuffed octopuses.
Thetford Academy will also offer a departure from this year’s theatrical themes with its rendition of the Greek tragedy Antigone. It will play on Nov. 21, 22, and 23 at 7 p.m.
The stage offerings start during autumn, but might end with snow on the ground. Both Woodstock Union High School and Lebanon High School have productions planned for December.
Lebanon High School’s Wet Paint Players will present Tuck Everlasting at Lebanon Opera House on Dec. 5, 6, and 7 at 7 p.m. Set in New Hampshire in the late 1800s, the show, based on the book by Natalie Babbitt, tells the story of a young girl who meets a new friend in the woods behind her home and learns about an astonishing secret his family has been keeping. Ticket prices have not been set.
Woodstock’s Yoh Theatre Players will bring the classic holiday tale A Christmas Carol to the stage on Dec. 13 and 14 at 7 p.m. and Dec. 15 at 3 p.m. The John Mortimer stage adaptation preserves Charles Dickens’ point of view through the use of a chorus and includes all the beloved characters. Tickets are $10 ($5 students/seniors) and can be purchased online at showtix4u.com.
With just days until show time for some theater groups, rehearsals are getting pretty intense. But if there was stress, it wasn’t showing at Lebanon Opera House last Friday, as the Trumbull Hall Troupe cast members ran through Carrying the Banner — cartwheeling, wisecracking and working out tight harmonies — in preparation for their production of Newsies this weekend.
The popular show, based on the historic newsboys strike of 1899, is extremely challenging both for its complicated choreography and its vocal demands, said Lebanon High School senior Ella Falcone, who plays Katherine Plumber, a young reporter who helps publicize the newsboys’ strike.
Not only that, but the nonprofit theater draws young actors from all over the Upper Valley, which means that many of them are pulling double duty, rehearsing for school theater productions as well as for Newsies. Lebanon High School freshman Miles Sturgess, for example, plays four roles in Newsies and is also in his school’s production of Tuck Everlasting. Director Lanni Luce West is also directing The Addams Family at Hartford.
Nevertheless, cast and crew members are confident they’re going to nail it.
“We have some really talented dancers in this cast,” Falcone said. “It’s going really well.”
Trumbull Hall Troupe president Jodi Picoult van Leer, who co-founded the group 15 years ago, concurred. “I’m stunned at the quality of the dancing,” she said in a phone interview. “I don’t know how they’re doing it.”
Van Leer, a bestselling author, normally writes original productions for Trumbull Hall, along with Ellen Wilber, a music teacher at Indian River School in Canaan. This year, with one of her own books being made into a Broadway show, she decided to do a licensed show.
The move was also an effort to remain competitive in a community that’s jam-packed with theater offerings. “When we started 15 years ago we were the only game in town,” van Leer said. “It was a big decision to license shows, but honestly, watching the rehearsals has only reinforced for me that it was absolutely the right thing.”
Admission to Trumbull Hall Troupe’s productions is by donation, with all proceeds going to charities, which this year include the Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth, the Upper Valley Haven and the Zienzele Foundation. The troupe also makes connections to the charities: Last weekend they sang at the CHaD half marathon; earlier this year they ran singing and acting workshops at the Haven; and they’ve been writing letters to children in Africa through the Zienzele Foundation.
Show times are Friday and Saturday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets can be reserved at lebanonoperahouse.org/events/newsies. Because of a recent ticket scam, the troupe is reminding people that tickets are not for sale. Donations can be made at the time of the show.
Sarah Earle can be reached at searle@vnews.com or 603-727-3268.