Introducing kids to theater at a young age can make them lifelong theater lovers, if not performers and playwrights. At least that’s the experience of Danica Murray, who’s directing “The Musical Adventures of Flat Stanley” at Broadway Palm Dinner Theatre.
“Hundreds of kids from Southwest Florida come to see these shows,” said Murray. “Not only do they ask how they can do theater, but they also start supporting local theater by going to Arts Bonita or Melody Lane or any one of these youth theater programs. It's a nice way to foster young talent.”
“Flat Stanley” is performed by adult actors for young children. That’s the same approach taken by Florida Studio Theatre in Sarasota, where young adult actors perform shows like “Peter Pan,” “Deck the Halls” and “Snow White” for kids as young as 4 or 5.
“One of the most special gifts you can give to a child is, of course, your time and then the experience of seeing a story play out live onstage together,” said Caroline Saldivar, the Director of Children’s Theatre at Florida Studio Theatre. “There's a wonderful study about how our heartbeats actually sync up whenever we're sitting in the theater and experiencing a story together, and to get to have that moment with your child is so moving.”
That shared experience inspired Cassie Grossarth to try acting at age 7. A dozen years later, she just landed her first professional contract.
“I used to do dance and stuff so they thought it would be something I was interested in,” Grossarth said. “Little did they know I would commit my entire life to it pretty much.”
Local actor Cameron Rogers did impressions for his family as a youngster.
“I remember my mom took my sister and I to see ‘The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,’” Rogers recalled. “At that moment, secretly, in the back of my mind I was thinking, oh man, that'd be really cool to do that.”
Not every child is destined to act. Some kids follow the pathway to playwriting.
To encourage those kids, Florida Studio Theatre sponsors an annual playwriting contest that receives over 5,000 submissions. Caroline Saldivar explains.
“They're not the kids that are often celebrated for academic achievement or athletic achievement,” Saldivar said. “This is a whole different type of achievement. The idea of being celebrated for your creativity is something that goes all the way back to ancient Greece, right? They did medal their playwrights like Olympic athletes, and that's why we continue to do it in our Young Playwrights Festival here today. It is a very unique talent these children have.”
Florida Rep’s Children’s Theatre Director, Monique Caldwell, notes some other ways that kids benefit from early theater experiences.
“Aside from just the performance element of it, they’re building their confidence,” Caldwell said. “They’re getting to know people they would not have known before.”
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“The Musical Adventures of Flat Stanley” is about a 10-year-old boy who mysteriously wakes up flat one morning. Audiences join Stanley as he embarks on an adventure around the globe searching for a solution to his unusual problem. The show runs through Nov. 14, with the remaining performance this week on Friday, Nov. 7 at 11:30 a.m.
“So first and foremost, it's a show for kids done by adults, by professionals for kids,” said Murray. “For a lot of kids, it's their first introduction to real theater done by professionals.”
Broadway Palm picked a play that readily connects with young audiences.
“Not only is it about traveling and having adventures and making new friends by writing letters, but it's just a flat-out fun time filled with big musical numbers and lots of exciting costume and set changes. It's a really high-energy show that the kids really enjoy.”
But it’s also a character and story already familiar to youngsters.
“One reason kids like this show so much is because a lot of kids have made flat Stanleys,” Murray observed. “They’ve made them, folded them up, and sent them somewhere. So it's a nice visual representation of when that happens, right?”
Florida Studio Theatre also chooses stories with characters that are already familiar to children. FST’s recent production of “Peter Pan” is a case in point.
“We went to the original text, the J.M. Barrie text, and brought it to life for our audiences here,” Saldivar noted.
FST Children’s Theatre typically attracts audiences of kindergarten to fifth-graders. Saldivar and her team left ample room for imagination in their adaptation of that story.
“Through special effects and animation, movies, TV shows and YouTube videos create every conceivable visual,” Saldivar explained. “By contrast, we let kids use their imaginations to fill in the blanks.”
For example, Florida Studio Theatre eschewed using wires to enable actors to actually fly above and across the stage.
“Instead, we used a very creative way to simulate flying and the entire audience gasped when the lights changed, and the flying started because they'd bought in. They were imagining that the characters were flying, and I think that, especially with children, we want to honor that imagination and cultivate that imagination and let them know that their imagination is unique to them, and what they can imagine could be far better and greater than what I could ever depict.”
Murray and her Broadway Palm team also acknowledge that the success of their show depends upon the cast and crew’s ability to engage their viewers’ imaginations. Cameron Rogers plays Stanley, and while his costume suggests two-dimensionality, Rogers is by no means flat. But the kids know he’s supposed to be flat and so that’s how they see him.
And to further engage their imaginations, Broadway Palm employs a video wall constructed by Chris McCleary to take the audience to each location Stanley visits, from Hollywood to Hawaii to Paris and back home in Michigan.
The approach of both theaters is grounded on the premise that children live in a world of imagination that parents and teachers may not fully understand even though they, too, inhabited a world of imagination when they were that age as well.
“There's a fantastic quote that they belong to a world that we once knew but have long since forgotten,” Saldivar noted, somewhat wistfully. “When you watch a child play, they don't need a lot to completely transform themselves into a pirate, a princess, or someone who's flying. They run around the room and say, ‘I'm flying, I'm flying,’ and they believe it and you believe it. That's what made [our] adaptation [of Peter Pan] so impactful for our audiences.”
In addition to active imaginations, children have unabashed opinions.
“They will let you know what they love. They will let you know what they didn't like,” observed Saldivar, who is mother to a 4-year-old. “It's so interesting to get to hear them say, well, I would have done it this way or if I was playing Captain Hook, I would have used this voice or if I was Peter, I would have done a cartwheel or I would have ran across the stage. They openly share their imagination with you, as an adult, and it validates the fact that they have an imagination and that they're encouraged to use it.”
Because the actors are adults, children also get the subliminal message that adults play and have imaginations too.
“Adults can experience these stories,” Saldivar added. “You don't have to let go of this part of you to grow up. And that's a great lesson of ‘Peter Pan’ as well. You can grow up and still have your imagination and still remember what it was to fly.”
Saldivar and her FST team will apply these same principles to their next two children’s shows: “Deck the Halls” and “Snow White.”
Saldivar describes “Deck the Halls” as a “sketch comedy cabaret style show” in which adult actors play Santa, Mrs. Claus and all their elves as they put on a holiday show Florida-style, with lighted palm trees, spoofs and the kids' favorite holiday carols.
In “Snow White,” there are just two actors playing Snow White, her evil stepmother, the huntsman and all seven dwarves.
“It is super imaginative, story theater style,” said Saldivar. “Similar to ‘Peter Pan,’ it leaves room for imagination. It's actually really exciting to circumvent their expectations. When they show up and realize there are only two actors, they’re all wondering how are they gonna do it? Then by the end, they are ready to tell you how they would be all of the dwarves, or could they put on the cape, or could they put on the crown, and could they have a chance to try it?”
As mentioned, not every child is on a path to performance. Some find their niche in writing the stories the actors perform and the crew produce. To encourage future generations of playwrights, Florida Studio Theatre conducts a year-round “Write a Play” arts integration program that provides students with the example, the inspiration, and the skills to write their own original plays.
“The Write a Play program has been in Sarasota County and Manatee County 35 years,” Saldivar pointed out. “At this point, we reach almost 50% of children in grades kindergarten through fifth grade.”
According to FST’s website, that amounts to roughly 47,000 students.
The program involves sending “playmakers” directly into classrooms with a collection of award-winning plays previously written by young students. After putting on a brief performance, the playmakers lead an interactive workshop that teaches wannabe playwrights the four key elements of playwriting: character, dialogue, conflict and setting. With these tools, students are turned loose to create original plays of their own guided by their teachers. Every student is encouraged to submit their work to FST’s Young Playwrights Festival.
And do they ever!
“We receive plays from over 5,000 young playwrights from around the world,” Saldivar reported. “We read every play at least two times so that it gets a fair shot, because my view of a play might be different than your view of a play, and we want every child to get the opportunity to be considered. And then we pick the ones that we think exemplify excellence for the school year and produce those. We have a big celebration day called our Young Playwrights Festival, where they get to be the superstars and walk the red carpet and have a banquet and be medaled like Olympic athletes for their bravery and playwriting.”
Even if they don’t go on to a career in writing, these young participants acquire an appreciation for what goes into conceiving, writing and producing a play, television show, movie or video. Some enter theater programs in their middle and high schools or even take theater in college. Many become lifelong theatergoers.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
