Mingus Union High School theater and choir director James Ball is very clear that he believes acting helps make students smarter.
“Students that have left Mingus have been very successful in their college programs and beyond,” Ball said. “What I hear a lot from alumni is they like how it created a well-rounded person and got them prepared for the next step.
“There’s a million studies out there that show when you are singing and dancing, it’s creating different synapses that make your brain be able to process better. Test scores for those involved with the arts are always higher.”
Ball also said that participating in theater is useful for combating the growth of instant gratification within American culture.
“Theatre is you keep going until you fail,” Ball said. “A lot of times students, especially in today’s generation, have this fear of failure, and when you’re doing an improv scene, you are going to fail at some point. You’re not going to be able to go any further. It’s just going to crumble. And then you say, ‘OK, that’s the end of that one, let’s move on and try a different scene.’ Building that gives them confidence.”
The MUHS’ theater program, A Troupe of Ridiculous Thespians or ATORT, typically puts on three main productions each year, a fall play, a winter play or musical revue, and a spring musical, while some of the students in the theater classes do additional shows such as a festival of one-act plays.
“Usually we get around eight weeks” for rehearsals, Ball said. “We do about four days a week at eight days long. The musicals we do five days a week, usually for about 10 weeks. And rehearsals are usually about three hours a day.”
While students have input on the selection of productions, “most of the time the plays they want to do are the ones on Broadway that don’t actually have rights,” Ball said. “They want to do ‘Sweeney Todd’ and ‘Phantom,’ but those operatic-style things are not exactly what we have [available] at our school.”
A principal’s committee approves the production choices.
Ball said that the ratio of students on stage to backstage “varies depending on the show. For example, the musical we did, ‘Mamma Mia,’ we had 32 people on stage and we had 55 people off stage working on that show.
“For the musical revue we did, ‘Broadway Through the Decades,’ we had, I believe, 80 people in the cast and we had 20 people on crew. That was a non-audition show, so anybody that showed up got to be in the show itself.”
“Sometimes when there’s auditions and people don’t make it into the cast — we do have a no-cut program where if they don’t make it into the cast, they can still be a part of the crew of their choosing,” Ball said.
The choir’s public performances include an annual winter concert, a jazz and pops night and a choir festival at the end of May as well as participating in regional and state competitions and community events such as the Thunder Valley Rally and the Jerome Christmas tree lighting.
ATORT also offers a free middle school summer camp that was launched four years ago. Ball said he aims to make it different from the annual Missoula Children’s Theatre program, focusing on discrete skills rather than an entire production. The camp drew 14 students during its first summer; this year, Ball said, over 60 signed up, with about 50 of the campers making it through to the final performance.
“Four years into the program, there’s some sophomores in high school that I remember that first year at the camp, that they took it like the seventh and eighth-grade year, that are now leading the camp,” Ball said. “It’s kind of the old adage of success breeds success.”
“Mingus has been a top finalist for musicals every single year the program’s existed since 2015, with the exception of COVID year, obviously, and the year after,” Ball said. “The ones that end up winning awards tend to stick in my head more.”
“The first award we won was actually with a Shakespeare play, ‘Much Ado About Nothing,’ won best play by the Arizona Thespians in 2014 … Doing ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ that was the first Disney show we did,” Ball said. “I had some parent helpers and I remember staying till like four in the morning building the set. Back in 2016, we did a musical called ‘Next to Normal.’ We actually partnered with the Verde Valley Mental Health coalition as a fundraiser.”
“We have a very limited number of theater opportunities in this valley,” Ball said. “What I hope to see is that I keep building this program at Mingus [I’ve had] over the past 18 years, some people go on — I have kids from L.A. to New York doing theater and it’s wonderful — but there’s a lot of kids that want to stay closer here to home, and I hope that at some point we can have some sort of theatrical organization in our valley somewhere, because I know there’s a thirst and a need for it, and hopefully that can emerge from this.”
