The Play

For the past few weeks I have been a little preocupied because of the school play. How did I get involved with this? Well, it's a long story, that I'll try to keep short. About 3 years ago, the school was interested in having some of the parents volunteer their time doing clubs after school. Well Drama was an option that Katelyn really wanted. Me having minimal experience in that area didn't even consider it and waited for someone else to do it. After a year and no one volunteering, Kate, begged, "Mom will you please start a Drama club? You could bring the kids and I'll watch them." Well I usually volunteer at the school anyway and it's only 1 hour a week. Also,compared to no one, I guess I could give it a try. I felt good about it and started researching. I picked every brain that I knew who had Drama experience. I taught elementary school before I had children, so I wasn't nervous about teaching, just needed some infromation and some help. We started out with the 5th and 6th graders and got about 20 kids including Katelyn and Annalisa. I got an idea from the GATE teacher to perform a book, " Stephanie's Ponytail". Taneil Serr without even having a child in there helped me. It would have been impossible to do without her. She does have some drama/singing and performing experience. We adapted 3 books into plays for the first semester just meeting 1 hour a week after school. Then the second semster we did a play written by my sister kind of roadshow style, you know with familiar songs that you change the words on. It was so fun and the kids had a blast.
The next year our numbers went up and this year we started out with 48 kids for the first semester and 32 for the second. The musical usually deters a few because it takes a bigger committment, dancing and singing.
Well, last year Heather Rhinehart joined the Drama Mama group. As you know she is a brilliant writer. We branched out and she wrote our play with the kids in Drama club in mind. It's very hard to find a play with so many parts and with no budget. Then Nancy Jenkins and I decided to try to write the music for the play. It actually worked and we had an original play and music.
This year we did it again and I feel like we're learning and improving every time we do it. So, the play is called Beverly Hills 9OZ10. It is about a girl named Zoe, Dorothy Rockafeller. The original Dorothy's grand daughter, who is a spoiled brat that only cares about what is fashionalble. She learns her lesson along the way and with a tin man, scarecrow and lion, she's off to see the wizard. It was a lot of hard work with such a huge cast of kids. It's also really hard to keep the momentum with only practicing once a week. We had to get a few extra's in. So you can see why I was a little on the stressed side. I had a lot of help with other parents, like my neigbor Tara, Suzanne, Dan and Tish, but still It's been an adventure. Kyle was one of the Jboyz. they passed there wigs around, whoever felt like wearing it. It was double cast, but the munchkins were in every performance. I had to put the picture of me smiling during the performance because I don't look stressed at all. Kiera Marrott for those in our ward played Zoe and Dillan Krupp the lion in one of the casts, but not in this picture. The wizard was an Elvis character, so I had to get a picture of him.

Kyle is the rapper in green with the yellow wig.

The wizard has entered the building

 The end.

whew!