A Night at the Theatre

This was our latest summer camp show which took place June-July 2024. Our summer program is a completely original idea curated by me. I take it as an opportunity to really hone in on theatre history and encourage our students to learn and experience new things in theatre. For our Summer camp productions I like to strip the actors of everything costume, set, and we use very minimal props. We provide our students with a black company shirt and they wear all black with jazz shoes or character shoes. We paint our platforms and actors blocks black for these productions.

A night at the theatre took our students through 5 different types of theatre such as, Pantomime, Greek Theatre, Shakespearean, Golden Age Musical Theatre and Modern Musical Theatre. I come up with the base of the story and we challenge our students to playwright. I love when directing becomes a beautiful collaboration between director and actor.

The story: Three students (rebel, nice, third we used the students real names but those were their archetypes.) go on a field trip to a fine arts museum when they are in the theatre section of the museum rebel gets bored and wants to explore the "restricted section" she brings nice and third along with her. This began our pantomime section. At the end of the pantomime rebel finds a time machine presses it and it takes her in the middle of a greek play so the audience gets to experience bits of each play. In this case I chose The Oresteia. Thespis emerges and becomes the one to guide them through the time machine to each era.

There's a catch! Each time they travel in the time machine the three main students swap from being teenagers to 8 years old. We had younger actors swap with the teenagers and here our students had to study the way their bigger doubles acted, sounded and moved. We did movement/voice exercises to assist our students in this.

Greek Theatre is then followed by Shakepeare trying to promote his play King Lear at a local pub but as he mistakenly bumps into someone during the process he gets a bottle smashed on his head. (I got them these prop beer bottles that smashed into pieces and it was so fun to see the audiences reaction to this every night.

From Shakespeare it brings them to Golden age musical theatre where the students found themselves on stage in the middle of a production and from there Thespis brought out a "wheel" the children spun it and it took them to Wicked the musical. and brought the students back to modern day. When the students returned back to their classmates at the museum they realized that only 60 seconds had passed by.

I really enjoyed teaching my students about the fundamentals of each era and having them explore within these worlds.