GREENFIELD — Fairy tale characters will come to life in two goofy, family-friendly shows performed by the local youngsters of two Greenfield theater companies.
KidsPlay Inc. children’s theater will present “Fractured” on April 20 and 21 at 7 p.m. and April 22 at 2 p.m. at the H.J. Ricks Centre for the Arts, 122 W. Main St. The show’s script has the young actors constantly interacting with the audience as they parody various children’s stories.
Greenfield-Central High School is preparing for its production of “Once Upon a Mattress,” a musical adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen story “The Princess and the Pea.” The show plays at 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday and at 2 p.m. on Sunday at Greenfield-Central High School, 810 N. Broadway.
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Click here to purchase photos from this galleryHere’s more on each production:
“Fractured”
Sitting backstage, huddled on the ground next to Cinderella, Owen Sickels reads off his lines, trying carefully to remember where he needs to fumble the words.
In the upcoming KidsPlay production of “Fractured,” the 13-year-old and his friends portray an array of familiar fairy tale favorites, who find themselves in limbo after the show’s protagonist steps out of the lines of her fable.
Princess Esmeralda falls in love with Lance A. Lot, a mortal from the real world, much to the chagrin of her parents. The king and queen banish Lance and strip Esmeralda’s fairy godmother of her powers — all while everyone in the “real world” stops reading fairy tales, throwing the lives of the characters into disarray.
The show is anchored by four KidsPlay veterans. Owen, Brynn Elliott, Olivia Greer and Luke McCartney take on the lead roles of, respectively, the king, the queen, the princess, Esmeralda, and her love interest, Lance A. Lot.
Each young actor has a dozen KidsPlay products under their belt, but this show offers a new challenge, they say. The script of “Fractured” requires them to regularly break the fourth wall and interact with the audience in a way they’ve been taught not to for years.
Their characters know there is a play going on and that they’re the actors involved. Esmeralda regularly refers to herself as protagonist of the story, and Lance is quick to bring all moments of foreshadowing to the audience’s attention.
For Owen, his role of a bad actor playing the king means constantly having to forget his lines — or, really, to remember when to forget his lines, he said.
It’s made preparing for his seventh show with KidsPlay a bit more fun, and he’s excited to see how the audience will react, he said.
“Once Upon a Mattress”
From her seat at the edge of the stage, Carolyn Voigt solved problems and made decisions.
“Ms. Voigt, do you want this shield on the set or should someone carry it?” a student asked.
Voigt pointed to the set.
“Ms. Voigt, we need more posters to pass out,” said another student, and Voigt hit print from her laptop.
Senior Violet Overstreet, cast as a nightingale, wandered in seeking approval for a hairstyle: Her short blond hair poufed and sprayed in place, adding a good five inches to her height.
“If we’re going for bird hair,” Voigt said, “then that’s good.”
Voigt, drama director, is in charge, directing her first musical, “Once Upon a Mattress.”
The show tells the story of a prince in search of a real princess. When a ragged and rain-bedraggled girl claiming to be a princess shows up at the castle door, the queen decides to test her authenticity. She places a pea under a pile of 20 mattresses, claiming that the delicate skin of a real princess would detect a pea — even under 20 mattresses.
Mark Raven, a senior in charge of publicity, approached Voigt with a radical advertising idea: to put a poster for the play in the display case just outside the auditorium and then fill the display case with several inches of peas. People won’t be expecting to see a showcase full of peas, he reasoned, so it will catch a lot of attention.
Newly hired in November, Voigt has had to hit the ground running in order to close out Greenfield-Central’s theater season with the traditional musical. The troupe finished up senior-directed one acts in mid-February and had just five weeks to rehearse and prepare for a musical.
“We all knew from the start that time would be our hurdle,” Voigt said, “but they all felt passionate about doing a musical, and I did, too. So we decided to take on this challenge together.
Another worried-looking student nears and dolefully informs his director that he is missing page 17 from his script. Voigt promises to photocopy a new page for him; she directs the snack cart to go backstage; she approves a couple of wall sconces for the set.
“It’s a 100-piece puzzle,” Voigt said. “You work on different sections, and in the last two weeks you pull all those little sections of the puzzle together to make this big piece of artwork.”
