By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
When ninth grader Makenna Bonagura was on the middle school yearbook book club she was envious of some of the students she saw in old editions.
“We got to look through a ton of old yearbooks, and I saw they had drama clubs. I was so jealous of them,” Makenna said.
So when Alice Walters and Sam Gorsevski, then eighth graders, pushed the idea of creating a student-driven drama club, Makenna was “100 percent” on board. “I loved the idea.”
She acted in the first production in spring 2023, and now, after serving as assistant director in last year’s show, she’s taken the helm as director of the whimsical parody “Willa Wonkie and the College Tour (Chocolate Not Included).”
The show, a comic spin-off of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” is on stage at the Bowling Green Performing Arts Center Friday, Feb. 21 and Saturday, Feb. 22 at 7 p.m. in Bowling Green Performing Arts Center.
Having high school students come back and help is part of the structure to keep developing student talent. Directing, Makenna said, is “stressful but also very rewarding. I love all of it.”
Her job started last summer when she went searching for a script. “Everyone wanted a more well known story, but we couldn’t afford anything super expensive, so I found this spin off of Willy Wonka.”
In this telling of the tale, our hero Charlie (Teagan Berger) is a poor girl with dreams of getting a scholarship to the elite Insolitus University.
Only five silver invitations for a critical tour to determine who gets a full ride are sent out. It looks like Charlie’s luck has run out. She gets the last one after its discovered some had fraudulently claimed it.
Her grandpa (Lauren Camoy) and mother (Calan Amos) sold their furniture to pay the application fee.
The play introduces us to a colorful, and comically unsympathetic cast of other hopefuls and their parents — Veruca Pepper (Kate Conway) and her father Dr. Pepper (Ace Rower); video game obsessive Mike Nintendo (Sam Shaal) and his mother (Lilienne Mueller); the would-be influencer Violet Turpisgarde (Lily Toth) and her father (Sammy Gerschutz), who is always injecting his own promotions into the conversation; and the star athlete Augustus Brawn (Gavin Schetter) and his doting mother (Lexi Hoffman). They provide an element of satire of contemporary youth culture.
They all gather at the campus for the tour led by the eccentric dean of students Willa Wonkie (Izzy Hammye).
The narrator (Avriana Hensley) guides the audience through the plot’s twists.
The production team includes eighth grader Adelyn Davis as assistant director, ninth grader Emma Nester as stage manager, and eighth grader Quinn Foust as assistant stage manager.
Kimberly Stevens, eighth grade language arts teacher, is advising the production as she has the previous two.
