Lions and tigers and homework, oh my!
High school students are juggling school obligations and roles in the Stepping Stone Players’ musical “Wizard of Oz,” all for the love of theater.
Jeremy Zadoorian, 14, is splitting his time this semester between two positions on the Hoover High freshman football team and three roles in the community theater company’s 10th annual musical.
It’s a revival production of the group’s first show performed a decade ago.
After school, Zadoorian has football practice before rehearsals with an hour in between.
On Saturday, he began the day with football practice, then came right over to the Hoover auditorium to start rehearsals.
“I like sports a lot and love drama and can’t choose between the two,” he said. “So far it’s working.”
He’s doing a great job, said director Ernie Gilbert.
“Jeremy is very reliable and very disciplined,” Gilbert said. “He brings a lot of energy to rehearsals and never avoids responsibility.”
In the play, Zadoorian plays a tree, an Ozian — a citizen of the Land of Oz — and a Winky, one of the witch’s guards who patrols the castle.
He is one of three trees that Dorothy and her friends meet in the forest.
He has to create a demeanor that scares them away, which is the most challenging of all three roles, he said.
“I have lines and have to get into the mind set of a grumpy old man,” he said. “I’ve gotten a lot better. I have to work on being loud.”
In directing the trees, Gilbert first asked them to think like grumbling old vaudevillians, or Don Rickles, he said, but they just returned a blank stare.
“So I told them to be loud and obnoxious, like the grumpy guy on the block who yells at the kids to get out of his yard,” Gilbert said.
The nice thing about the community theater group is that it can provide unique opportunities for young actors to play different kinds of characters, he said.
Megan Weiss, 17, a senior at Burbank High School, divides her time between keeping up her 4.5 GPA, serving as captain of the high school dance team and two roles in this year’s “Wizard of Oz.”
She plays a dancing Ozian and dancing jitterbug.
“Dancing is a lot of fun, especially when it’s put into a setting like the ‘Wizard,’” she said.
The jitterbug segment is done all in black light, and the dancers wear white gloves and shoes and accents on their bodies.
The audience sees only the white objects onstage, said Stepping Stone Players secretary Susan Kussman.
“It’s fascinating to watch because the steps are fast and complex,” she said.
Megan also is doing a tap number and credits choreographer Myra Santini for the great routine and working with the dancers who are newer to tap.
“She’s amazing,” Megan said. “For many people, this is the first time they are tap dancing.”
