Glyneva Bradley-Ridout, left, is Dorothy and Jennifer MacKinnon is The Tin Man in the West Hill Secondary School music theatre class production of The Wizard of Oz which open Friday night at The Roxy in Owen Sound at 7:30 p.m.
Sun Times staff
Until she discovered the stage, Glyneva Bradley-Ridout wasn’t nearly so sociable.
“I’m naturally a shy person, and theatre has really helped me to come out of my shell,” the Grade 12 student said.
Bradley-Ridout plays Dorothy in the West Hill music theatre class’s new take on the classic Broadway musical Wizard of Oz. It opens Friday night at The Roxy Theatre.
With a cast of close to 40, and a technical crew of 10 or so, the team worked together on this project since September.
Jennifer MacKinnon, The Tin Man, said she isn’t shy, but has learned much about herself and working with others. She’s made connections and friendships with people it’s unlikely she’d have met outside this theatre project.Both actors have been in several school and community productions before and said every show is a new challenge, building on their acting, singing and dancing skills. But theatre also teaches time management, communication, cooperation and other life skills, the actors and some production crew said.
“Since I’ve gotten into theatre I’ve gotten way more sociable with people and more comfortable with myself,” Bradley-Ridout said at a rehearsal Tuesday. “I’m more outgoing and more confident.”
Stage manager Samantha Blake and tech crew member Jantien Sneyd, also a theatre co-op student at The Roxy, said life and interactive skills they’ve developed go beyond the needs of this production.
“I’m generally an independent worker but working with everyone here has shown me that I can trust other people to do work,” said Blake.
She took the course to acquire technical experience and said working with the group has been a revelation.
“We have to keep very open lines of communication, which I think is another thing a lot of us have learned is how to talk to one another and say I need help, me especially, I don’t usually like to ask for help.”
An Owen Sound Youth Theatre Coalition veteran with a long interest in theatre and much organizational experience, Sneyd isn’t in the music theatre class this year, but lends her expertise as part of her Roxy co-op this semester.
She said theatre has taught her to work with others and manage her time in other aspects of her life.
“Before I started getting involved in theatre I was a bit of a slacker, not going to lie,” Sneyd said. “Especially as stage manager it helped me realize how much organizing your time and everyone else’s time makes things so much easier. It’s helped me in school and I know it’s helped other people in school as well. It kind of pushes people to do better than what they were before they were involved in theatre.”
Those life skills are as much the point of a music theatre class as putting together the production, said Emily Cameron, who teaches the class with Henriette Blom.
“Giving them the skills that they’re going to need to be successful later on in life. I think that’s the ultimate goal as a teacher,” Cameron said Tuesday at The Roxy.
“It’s teaching kids about life, how to cope with stress, how to get along with people you might not otherwise find yourself with, or even like. It’s learning about yourself as a person. What better way to put yourself in someone else’s shows than to not only pretend to be someone else but to have to deal with 50 other people everyday; deal with their emotions, their baggage, their problems as well as your own and get through it all.”
West Hill’s version of the Wizard of Oz adds some new staging twists to the classic script, with plenty of singing and dancing and some symbolic emphasis on the message within the simple story, both teachers said.
A dancer for 14 years with Anne Milne’s School of Dance, Jen MacKinnon brings that expertise to the mix as The Tin Man.
Nick Varley is Scarecrow. Aaron Crose is The Lion.
The Wizard of Oz is at The Roxy Friday night at 7 p.m., Sunday at 3 p.m. and again Monday and Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are availabe at the Roxy box office.
While Milne has choreographed the three main dance scenes for the group, MacKinnon has provided both coaching in class and some choreography for other scenes. It’s the first leading stage role in the community for the Grade 12 actor, singer and dancer who plans to study performing arts as a “triple threat” next year. She played Grace, an ugly step sister, in YTC’s Cinderella, was a witch in OSLT’s Macbeth and was Rose, a part created to feature her dancing in West Hill’s last musical, Beauty and The Beast two years ago.
MacKinnon also brings to the cast a positive approach she says is the reason she plans to pursue a performance career.
“I’m a very crazy person. I really enjoy acting,” she said. “If someone is a in a down mood, I will go crazy to make people happy. I just really enjoy entertaining people.”
This role has confirmed that career interest.
“It’s kind of my last chance to make sure that I’m feeling confident with myself. So far, so good.”
Blom, who is both music and artistic director for the project, said the intense, months-long project can be “a life transformative experience for students.”
“They are learning to interact with each other in ways they would never do. We’ve spent three or four hours together every day for the whole semester and now we’re up to eight hours a day together. There’s something about community in that.”
Everybody contributes a gift, on and off stage, with a goal of not just telling the story but sending audiences home with a deeper understanding of this classic tale, Blom said.
It’s about a lonely child discovering she is her own hero and realizing she is loved in ways she would never have understood without adversity.
“That’s part of the message here. Everybody came together for Dorothy, even though it was in her imagination, or was it?”
bhenry@thesuntimes.ca
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