Student production of ‘Shrek’ on stage at Massay theater

MAT-SU — A series of firsts surrounds Colony Middle and High Schools’ production of “Shrek: The Musical,” on stage this weekend only at the Glenn Massay Theater.

The show is the first play to run in Mat-Su College’s new theater, for example, and the first full production the Colony Drama Club will perform on a stage other than the one at their home school.

“I think this is a really, really big show for us, and not just because we’re on this stage,” said senior Peyton Shaw, Colony High Drama Club President.

Shaw said the show features more than 100 costumes and 65 cast members — not including the technical crew or the musicians — making it Colony’s largest production since Les Miserables in 2009.

Director Brian Mead said having a real orchestra pit, rather than temporarily pulling out seats or putting the musicians onstage with the actors, also has been “a lifesaver.”

“It’s always been a challenge doing a musical at Colony,” Mead said. “We have the bigger stage of all the (Valley) high schools and it’s still too small.”

While the size of the stage allows for better audience visibility and a better understanding of what large-scale acting is like for budding professional actors, it has also presented some new challenges for a range of drama club members, Shaw said.

Costume and makeup designers fit that bill.

“We have to create costumes and makeup that you can see from 100 feet away, which is not something we usually do,” Shaw said.

For some of the actors, voice projection seems to be an underestimated issue.

“On our voices, it’s much more taxing and much more demanding, because it’s not as intimate a setting,” Shaw said, of the larger stage.

Colony senior Jaylon Jones, who plays Shrek for three of the six performances, said the actors do have microphones, but that doesn’t help as much with projection as one might think.

“You have to adapt,” he said.

Jones knows that perhaps better than anyone else. He came to the stage just one year ago, as a junior, and has already been cast in six Colony High School shows (including radio plays). This is his second lead role but his first in front of a large, live audience, as well as his first musical.

“It’s definitely a big step in a different direction,” Jones said.

Adapting to live and musical theater is not his only challenge, however. Getting into character for this particular play has been an adjustment from his previous roles.

“Shrek is a little misunderstood,” he said. “He seems to believe that he is what everyone makes him out to be, and so he’s a little antisocial and grumpy.”

But Jones isn’t really like that, he said.

“It’s a big difference from my actual personality and so it’s interesting to perform this role,” he said.

Colony Middle School eighth-grade student Grace Eldredge, who plays Fiona in the performances Friday morning and Saturday evening — as well as a Duloc Dancer and a tap-dancing rat — is basically Jones’ opposite.

Eldredge has only done musicals so far, she said, and has performed significant but not leading roles in the middle school’s “Little Mermaid,” “Cinderella” and “Beauty and the Beast.”

She has also played a chorus girl in four Valley Performing Arts productions and has performed on larger stages than the Massay’s with Sonja’s Studio of Dance in Wasilla.

When she got the part of Fiona, she said she was “totally surprised.”

“I tried out for Teen Fiona, who just sings one song, and then they gave me a dancer. I was like, ‘OK, cool, that’s kind of what I was expecting,’” she said.

Two weeks later, Mead and voice director Lani Monds asked Eldredge to be the understudy for adult Fiona and said she would be guaranteed three shows.

“I was like, ecstatic,” Eldredge said.

Working closely with the high school actors “was a little awkward at first,” she said, but now she’s “friends with a lot of them.”

Which kind of follows the moral of the story:

“To be yourself, even when people don’t want you to be yourself,” Eldredge said.

The songs “Freak Flag” and “Always Pretty,” for example, speak to that, she said.

Shaw acknowledged “Shrek is a story that everyone knows,” but if the cast members do their jobs right, she said, the “hopes and dreams” of their characters will shine through in an original way.

“As an actor, you wanna create something that’s new and your own but you also have to make it in a way that it’s familiar to the audience, because then otherwise the audience wont like it,” Shaw said.

To purchase tickets for Shrek: The Musical, visit seatyourself.biz/colony. Showtimes are 7 p.m., Friday; 2 p.m., Saturday and 7 p.m., Saturday.

Contact Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.