GREENSBORO — Summer is usually the off-season for school musicals. But a new day camp offered by Guilford County Schools is giving middle and high school students the opportunity to put on a show outside of the regular school year.
Over the past five weeks, more than 60 students have been preparing to stage “High School Musical Jr.” — an abbreviated, one-hour adaptation of the hit 2006 Disney Channel movie. Performances, which are open to the public, start Friday evening and run through Sunday at the Northwest Guilford High School auditorium.
Mason Lewis, the Northwest High School rising sophomore playing leading man Troy Bolton, said all the rehearsals for a school-theater production usually come on top of lots of other demands.
With rehearsals during the school year sometimes stretching to 9 p.m., it can be hard to manage everything.
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“This is really great, just being able to do theater without school stressing me out,” he said.
The production is being directed by Northwest Middle School teacher Jacob Luck and Kernodle Middle choir director Nicholas Shoaf.
The camp was open to rising seventh-graders through seniors in high school, with an average participant age of about 12. Most students this year came from Northwest’s middle or high school, but the camp was open to students across the district, and so a few other schools were represented as well.
About a dozen students opted to be behind-the-scenes while the other 52 chose to be actors.
“There’s so many kids here,” Lewis remarked.
Students auditioned for parts, with the roles of Sharpay Evans, the over-the-top high school theater diva, and Gabriella Montez, the female lead, some of the most popular. Typically, the show is for 11 to 20 performers, but for this performance there’s more students singing together in ensemble roles in addition to the main cast.
Amelia Winter, a Northwest Middle School rising eighth-grader who plays Gabriella, said having so many more students in the production is definitely a big change from her past experiences with school theater. That might sound like a recipe for chaos, but Winter said last week, just before the final week of dress rehearsals, that the production was feeling the most pulled-together at that point of any she’d been in before.
The total rehearsal time has been about the same or just a little bit more, she said. But there’re other differences with this production, she explained, like the amount of maturity and time spent learning lines she’s seen from her fellow actors.
“I think we are all just closer as a cast and we are all just really trusting of each other,” she said. “Everyone just seems to know exactly what they are doing.”