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Show People- Can the Missoula Children’s Theater Make your child a star?

On Sunday, March 3 of this year, a red Ford Ranger pickup registered in Missoula, Montana, quietly pulls into Oley, Pennsylvania, a small town in a valley of farms near Reading.

Identical red Rangers, each carrying two occupants and similar cargo in the enclosed pickup beds, arrive in St. Joseph, Missouri; North Powder, Oregon; Parker, Colorado; Incline Village, Nevada; and Bothell, Washington.

The following day, these and 15 other American communities will begin to experience the magic of a most remarkable theater company.

by John Grossmann in Delta Airlines’ Skywriting Magazine

(Thanks to Barb Neilan for passing this along- Russ)

From humble roots in 1970, the nonprofit Missoula Children’s Theatre (MCT) http://www.mctinc.org/ has grown into a nationwide touring company unlike any other. Many companies bring theater to small communities. MCT goes one remarkable step further: It puts local youth onstage, casting, rehearsing and costuming as many as 50 to 60 children in a 70-minute musical. Five days after the parts are cast, the show goes on. What seems impossible is not. Each week across America, small miracles happen, and the effects resonate long after the music has died and the sets are struck.

In the cab of the Ranger arriving in Oley sit Amy Magouirk and Andrew Gunn, who’ve driven from Mashpee, Massachusetts, where they most recently staged the MCT version of Hansel and Gretel. Magouirk, 25, has crisscrossed North America and been to 10 other countries in her three-year MCT stint. Gunn, 23, reported to MCT headquarters in Missoula for training on December 27, 2002, and hit the road with his partner on January 2. Last week found them in Johnstown, New York. The week before, they were in Livermore, Maine. Sometimes they stay in a college dorm or motel. More often, as here in Pennsylvania, they’re hosted by a local family.

In Easton, Pennsylvania, back in January, more than 200 children showed up for their audition. Today, Monday, about half that many kindergartners through sixth-graders report to the all-purpose room of the Oley Valley Elementary School. Right on time, at 3:45 p.m., the children are instructed to form a big square around the edges of the room, shortest to tallest. Magouirk and Gunn, each clutching a yellow legal pad, step to the center of the big square of faces.

Over time, the casting process has become as finely tuned as the scripts—fairy tales such as Jack and the Beanstalk and Little Red Riding Hood, adapted to provide parts for all ages and for the MCT actors/directors—and the schedule of Monday-through-Friday rehearsals and Saturday performances.

The casting process begins with each child saying a number, starting with the smallest, “One,” and continuing around the square to the tallest, “111.” For the next two hours, the exercises continue in incremental steps. The children are told to say their name and age. Next, they echo a simple line, then a longer one. They’re instructed to sing. They go through a few simple dance steps, some of which, they’ll later discover, are from the play. Magouirk and Gunn huddle several times comparing notes as maybes turn to yeses and they zero in on their two leads.

At 5:43, two minutes early, the audition concludes. Magouirk and Gunn instruct the children to sit on the floor in the middle of the room, pulling everyone tightly together. First they announce the names of the three assistant directors who will run the lights and sound and help run the production. As the rest of the names are called, each child comes up and gets a schedule from one of the assistant directors, already on the job, then rejoins the group, so those who got parts are not separated from those who didn’t. Most of the cast will begin rehearsal tomorrow after school, but the Witch’s cooks and Hansel and Gretel are told they will get a half-hour break for dinner and begin rehearsing immediately afterward.

“You forget how young they are,” Gunn says a bit later. “We had a girl last week named Alisha who was the technical person. She did both the sound and the lighting, following two scripts, one for each. She learned all of it in three days. After the show, somebody reminded us she was 10.”

“Whatever we give them, they’ll do it,” says Magouirk. “I completely underestimated kids before I started this job. It’s amazing what they can accomplish.”
Kids taking a bow

Jim Caron, founder and executive director of the Missoula Children’s Theatre, inadvertently learned that lesson—which soon became the guiding principle of his innovative troupe—in the early 1970s. His theater company itself also came about by happenstance. Caron was headed to Oregon for a friend’s wedding in his peace sign–emblazoned Volkswagen bus when it started sputtering just short of Missoula. While his car was being repaired, Caron spotted a poster announcing auditions for a local, semiprofessional production of Man of La Mancha. He’d always wanted to play Sancho Panza. When he saw there would be two weeks of rehearsals and a week of performances, he tried out, driving all night afterward to make his friend’s wedding. In the callback the next day he won the part—and never left Missoula.

Caron and Don Collins, the actor who played Don Quixote, co-founded a small company of adults to put on plays for children and occasionally traveled statewide, bringing live theater to small rural towns. The two alternated getting the $75 weekly salary. A booking in Miles City, Montana, some 600 miles away, redirected the company’s mission onto its current path. They’d already cast local children in a production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and found the children creative and energizing to work with. But there was no way they could take the Missoula youngsters to the other side of the state for a midweek performance in winter. So they put an advertisement in the Miles City newspaper, asking for children there to try out for the play.

“We went a week early to audition and train the kids,” recalls Caron. “The two of us walk into the gym and there’s 450 kids waiting for us—in a town of about 3,000 people. We said, ‘Um, we’re going to start in about five minutes or 10 minutes,’ and we put our heads together and came up with a bunch of exercises to quickly get a sense of who could be heard and who had bright faces, who had energy and who had a good attitude. Thirty years later we’re still doing a lot of the things we developed with a gun to our head in Miles City.”

By Thursday of rehearsal week, Caron realized the Miles City children were better than the Missoula children had been after six weeks of preparation. Why? “Because they were so completely focused on it. It was their whole lives for five days,” he points out, identifying that as “one of the secrets of the project.”

Caron invokes the word “project” often in describing the Missoula Children’s Theatre, which has grown from visiting a dozen towns in this fashion in the mid-1970s to staging shows in more than 900 communities in all 50 states and 29 foreign countries in 2003. This year, nearly 60,000 children—from kindergartners to high school seniors—will don costumes and work backstage. The MCT operating budget has expanded likewise, from $26,000 in 1975 to $4 million today. Less than 10 percent of that amount comes from grants and donations. MCT, from the very beginning, has earned 90 percent of its operating expenses by charging local communities for its services, which include staging acting workshops and assemblies during the school day. Most towns cover the costs, which currently average $2,600, primarily with admission tickets and sponsorships from local businesses.

“This is a real company now, with retirement benefits and everything,” Caron explains, seemingly a bit amazed himself that his idealistic little venture has grown to 50 full-time employees at the home base, including six people making costumes and three in the tour liaison office to track and assist the 32 teams currently on the road.

“When we open a Broadway theater program and see an actor who got her start in MCT, or recognize one of our kids on television, it’s wonderful, but it’s the frosting on the cake,” Caron says, explaining that the underlying value of his project is to help children blossom, to realize if they work hard they can achieve great things. “We’re teaching communication skills, self-confidence, teamwork, social skills, teaching children a sense of their own potential. The substance of what we do is the kid who goes to college who never thought he could, the handicapped child [and MCT doesn’t shy away from casting children with all manner of disabilities] who realizes he can mainstream himself in life. That’s why I stayed in this business.”

Saturday, performance day, begins with a late-morning dress rehearsal. Having missed rehearsals on Thursday because of a snow day, the excited children are kept firmly on task by Magouirk and Gunn as they prepare for an afternoon and evening performance.

Mothers drop off cupcakes and fruit juice in the school cafeteria for the cast party after the evening show. After the last line is said and the cast learns how to strike a final ensemble pose and take a bow, everyone heads to the cafeteria for a quick lunch and makeup. Finally, with the school auditorium nearly filled with camera-toting parents, many bearing flowers for daughters in the cast, Magouirk and Gunn lead the children in a few preperformance exercises to limber their voices and calm their nerves.

“Make a sound like a siren.”

“Say the alphabet in one breath.”

“When we are backstage, we are . . .”

“Quiet,” say the children in unison.

“When we are onstage, we are . . .”

“LOUD.”

“And what do we do?”

“Smile.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, you have worked incredibly hard this week and you lost a day of rehearsal. Go out there and have a blast. All this hard work is not going to be worth it unless you go out there and have the time of your life.”

Another Missoula Children’s Theatre show goes on.

Hours later, as the evening cast party winds down, Magouirk and Gunn finish breaking down the set and stow it in their truck, along with all the costumes, which they’ll wash in a Laundromat in Ogdensburg, New York, way up near the Canadian border. They’ll arrive there late on Sunday, and on Monday start all over again.

John Grossmann is a frequent contributor to Sky. His history of YMCACamp Belknap in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, was published earlier this year in time for the camp’s centennial summer.

http://www.delta-sky.com/editorial/skywriting/justcauses/justcauses.htm

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