This being our 3rd season and 6th youth theater production, now is the time to reflect on what is our unique value proposition to the creative space. What immediately jumps out is our heavy focus on dance as a critical storytelling tool. Many of our cast members had no prior experience in dance, but our creative team works extremely hard to transform them into confident and convincing dancers over the course of three months.
In our production of Little Shop of Horrors (LSOH) we have over 15 fully choreographed dance numbers. We took this opportunity to celebrate multiple genres and styles including hip-hop, jazz, ballet, modern, Jamaican dancehall, salsa, and African. Of particular note we celebrate our ancestors with the inclusion of Kumina, and Dinki mini, which are Jamaican folk dances, and also with a homage to Dia de Muertos celebrations. Some of the standout musical numbers in this show are “Skid Row (Downtown)”, “Ya Never Know”, and “Don’t Feed the Plants”. You will see the unmistakable influence of pop culture infused throughout our performances, with even some choreography elements from Bad Bunny’s Superbowl halftime performance. What you will for sure notice are the dancing plants – and we have many of them!
If you’ve attended a prior production, we are sure you will agree that this is our best show to date. We had to come up with very creative ways to support a cast of 48 youth performers, for a production that traditionally has a cast size of 12! Each production we focus on strengthening new musical theater skills and for this show we wanted to go deeper in character development as well as teaching youth how to learn vocal harmonies by ear. Overall, our focus was on elevating the expectations of youth theater productions, and provide to the audience a professional theater show.
The various themes of ambition and greed, and class and poverty, highlighted in LSOH is packaged in a family friendly and highly entertaining way, and will be sure to win over audiences. It’s LSOH like you’ve never seen it before! The production also provided many teachable moments, that frankly made the production team feel super old, such as explaining to an 1 1 year old how to hold and use a rotary phone. The Doo-Wop, Rock and Roll, Motown and Soul music throughout this production is a great vehicle for advancing the storyline and we are sure a few songs will get stuck in your head.
We always tell the cast, that you know you are creating powerful art when the audience can connect with the emotions being evoked through the artform. We hope this production will be a true experience for you, and that you can appreciate the tremendous hard work that was put in by the production team, the parents, and the cast, to bring this story to life.
– Jason A. Ellis
@ellisja876