It had been about nine years since Mingus Union High School’s A Troupe of Ridiculous Thespians’ last dance show, so Director James Ball thought it was ripe for another go.
“In a normal show year, we have three shows,” said ATORT senior Lya Earles, one of the leads. “This year we have four. So it’s very ambitious.”
The students will perform “Pride & Prejudice” in January and a musical in the spring The troupe staged its last show, “Trap,” from Oct. 3 to 11, but it was a shorter show, Earles said, so they were able to squeeze in the practices they needed for both productions.
The December show, “The Pumpkin King Steals Christmas,” featuring Jack Skeleton, who finds his way into Christmas Town and adds a spooky twist — not to be confused with the copyrighted “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and Jack Skellington.
The show premieres on Saturday, Dec. 6, at 6:30 p.m. and will show at the same time on Friday and Saturday, Dec. 12 and 13. Matinee shows at 2 p.m. will be on Sundays, Dec. 7 and 14.
Tickets are available at atort.ludus.com. They are $12 for adults, $8 for students and children and $10 for seniors.
Junior Jayce Lauler “has some awesome character movements with Jack, because he’s a skeleton,” Earles said. “My character is the rag doll and everything. So it’s hard to have to walk differently and get into that character. ‘I’m not me, I’m a skeleton.’”
Lauler said it was very strange to shift from traditional acting to a dance focused performance like this one.
“Being able to try to translate the ‘how you feel’ with just your face and your body,” he said. “Being able to pantomime or to show things [is more difficult].”
Lauler has been involved in the theater program and ATORT since fourth grade, he said.
“I was really young. I was in ‘Newsies’ and ‘A Christmas Carol,’” he said.
Carla Renard, who owns Concept Contemporary & Ballet Academy in Cottonwood, is the choreographer. As a high school club ATORT is mainly reserved for current students.
“Because it’s CCBA, we do have some alumni that take classes with her that are in here,” Ball said. “We have some younger kids that take classes that are in here. And so that way it’s actually kind of more of a community-type of program than just specifically high school students.”
Along with CCBA, ATORT will often do a summer dance show, which doesn’t bring a huge crowd, Ball said, but does give the students good opportunities to learn acting and dancing.
“She is brilliant, and she just gets these ideas like, ‘hey, let’s turn this story into a dance performance,’” said assistant choreographer Stephen Renard, Carla’s husband and a MUHS physics teacher. “She’s a gifted storyteller. And so she takes stories that we all know, she always puts a little twist on it and she makes it so that dance — which normally people go, I’m not going to go sit and watch dance for two hours — and she turns it into something that people look forward to.”
The troupe has been practicing for this show twice a week since August.
“While we have overall 48 [cast members], sometimes … we’ve got 20 kids practicing one thing, 20 kids practicing another thing,” Renard said. “Three over here and two on stage and so it’s this juggling act to make sure that even when they’re not specifically being focused on, whether it’s their dance — their turn, so to speak — that there’s always something for them to be doing and honing and getting better at.”
Ball said it was a non-audition show; anybody who wanted got a role, sorted into groups or roles based on their previous abilities to help them grow as performers.
“It’s, in an educational setting, great, because there’s so many kids that would never be caught dead on stage dancing,” Ball said. “But man, they love costumes or, man, they want to work with sound and lights. Our sound person for this, actually next year wants to go into audio engineering.”
Senior Gizmo Petterson wanted to get into theater and tried out acting, but knew his passion was elsewhere in performing arts, like making the costumes.
“Doing that first costume … freshman year, cemented into my brain that I was going to do costumes for the rest of my high school career for this show,” Petterson said.
Because the cast is so large for this show, being in charge of the costuming was daunting.
“There’s so many dance numbers and everybody needs, like, seven different costumes,” Petterson said. “But it’s been … a very good learning experience.”
Most of the costumes are made using leotards or other premade items that can be put together to form the costume as a whole, but several have to be made from scratch.
“I think the toughest thing has been translating ‘The Night Before Christmas’ to dance,” Petterson said “Because they’re kind of aesthetically different genres. I think probably doing the mayor and Jack and Sally has been the hardest [because they’re from scratch].”
