By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Two local youth theater institutions are on stage this weekend with Horizon Your Theatre presenting “Sideways Stories from Wayside School” and BGSU’s Treehouse Troupe presenting its touring show “When She Had Wings’ on campus.
“Sideway Stories from Wayside School”
When the audience first meets Mrs. Gorf’s class on the 30th floor of Wayside School, only two students are present.
Mrs. Gorf does have a row of large shiny apples on her desk … not enough yet to make apple sauce, though. That’s what concerns her remaining students.
The Horizon Youth Theatre will present “Sideways Stories from Wayside School” Friday and Saturday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. at Otsego High School. The play is based on the Louis Sachar books adapted for the stage by John Olive. The play brings together stories from the three books in the series. They are modern fairy tales told in twisted, comic style with just the appropriate touch of darkness.
This is the troupe’s show for actors 8-12, so the elementary school setting is in their wheelhouse. Not that any of them, we’d hope, have had to experience the hauntings and magical mischief that beset Wayside School.
Take Mrs. Gorf (Violet Grossman). Her method of discipline when one of her pupils goes astray, whether in their behavior or lessons, is to wiggle her ears and turn them into an apple. “I love apples,” she declares. “I hate children.”
So Bebe (Alice Walters) and Myron (Liam Rogel) know what’s at stake when the teacher wants Bebe to count from one to 100, alphabetically. She does all right starting with eight, then eighteen, until she says five instead of eleven. Mrs. Gorf’s ears start wiggling thanks to members of the magic producing kids in black. She chases poor Bebe around the classroom. Myron uses a mirror to turn the curse back onto Mrs. Gorf, who turns into an apple. Louis (Alexander Sands), a good natured student who seemingly just wanders around Wayside School being helpful and keeping its secrets, decides he wants a snack and eats the apple.
With that we meet the other three members of the class — Leslie (Lucy Pafford), Rondi (Lauren Peppers) and Dameon (Aiden Thomas) — who come back from being apples.
When their new teacher, Mrs. Jewls (Emy Wilkins), takes over, a whole new set of adventures begin.
There’s a rat in raincoats (Jonah Truman), an exuberant tango teacher (Isobel Roberts-Zibbel) and a formerly world famous psychiatrist, Mr. Pickle (John Simpson) who wants to redeem his reputation. It’s all rather silly and entertaining.
The cast is up to the task of creating this magical world that nonetheless keeps one foot firmly planted in the real world of an elementary classroom.
Mrs. Jewls is both wacky and a flighty, but with some sense of classroom control, even to the point of writing her own name on the discipline list.
Myron really is a good kid. He can’t help it if Leslie’s pigtails speak to him and urge him to pull them.
Dameon has problems with his work, but it can’t dent his cheer. Rondi is high spirited. Bebe is quite the boisterous cowgirl.
The use of the kids in black helps facilitate the script’s magic, and they provide sound effects including the scream that accompanies each mention of Mrs. Gorf’s name.
When Mrs. Jewls disappears, she’s replaced by Mrs. Gorf’s son (Charlie Vostal) intent on avenging his mother. His character has shades of Anthony Perkins, and his soliloquy while holding an apple aloft has echoes of Hamlet.
All this ties together the series of stories, and resolves to a happily-ever-after ending, unless Mrs. Gorf manages to escape from the nether world on the 19th floor.
“When She Had Wings”
In the Treehouse Troupe’s “When She Had Wings” the 9-year-old is played by a college student. Hannah Hess captures her character’s youthful ebullience and as well as all the nagging frustrations.
The BGSU outreach troupe is in the middle of its touring season during which it will visit nine schools in Northwest Ohio. The troupe will present “When She Had Wings,” directed by Cynthia Stroud, tonight (Nov. 7) at 7 p.m. and Saturday, Nov. 9 at 2 p.m. in the Eva Marie Saint Theatre on the Bowling Green State University campus. Tickets are online at bgsu.edu/arts or by calling 419-372-8171.
Nearing her 10th birthday, B wants to fly, like she did before she could walk, and has set a deadline of her 10th birthday.
Yet everything in her world is weighing her down Her father (Alexis Reinbolt) insists on calling her“Little Missy” or Beatrix when he’s mad and collects garden gnomes. Her mother calls “not very often” and has already enrolled B in a “fat camp” for the summer. B is living proof of gravity — she’s fallen out of the tree so many times, her father says, that the hospital has a gurney named for her.
All B wants to do is spend the summer in her tree. But short of that she’s intent of learning to fly before she’s 10.
Then an unexpected visitor arrives in the tree. At first B takes her for a very large, ungainly bird. But she’s definitely a woman. Is she a stroke sufferer who has wandered away from a nearby nursing home? Or Amelia Earhart, who has tumbled from the sky where she has been caught between going up and going down?
B isn’t sure and neither are we but B decides A (Lauren Lash) can only help. Lash is careful not to tip her hand in any direction, with her early squawks, disjointed jabber, then a very clear enunciation of Earhart’s call letters KAHQQ, the last thing the aviator was heard saying.
The script by Suzan Zender slips in some lessons about Amelia Earhart and about flight. B notes in a kind of a lecture to A and some gnomes, that Earhart crashed a lot — just like she keeps falling out of the tree.
B is assisted in her efforts to fly by her imaginary crew Wingman (Sophia Walcher) and Sound Op (Hope Elizabeth Eller). They express through sound effects and swirling motions the joy of being airborne.
B decides that A is Earhart who has been caught in the air, and that she needs to complete that final flight however it ends.
So off they go taking the audience with them.
