‘Twelfth Night’ opens at Colony High

PALMER — On a Wednesday afternoon, as athletes pump iron next door, kids in pantaloons stand outside the Colony High School theater waiting for their cues.

Seated dead center is their director, Brian Mead, timing the rehearsal and taking notes on an iPad.

The play, William Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” opens at 7 p.m., tonight with performances also scheduled for Feb. 18, Feb. 24 and Feb. 25 in Colony High School’s theater. There’s still some stage painting left to do, some of the actors have to smooth out a line or two and a couple costumes aren’t 100 percent done yet.

But you can see what they’ve done with the Bard’s gender-bending comedy. And, to tell the truth, it looks pretty good.

“There’s a popular film out there called ‘She’s the Man’ that’s based on this,” Mead said. “I didn’t see it, but all the kids know it.”

If you’re not familiar, the play follows a pair of shipwrecked siblings, a man and a woman, who wash up in a foreign land. The gender-bending ensues when the woman, Olivia, disguises herself as a man and has to fend of a female suitor. There’s also a servant driven mad and a mooching would-be-matchmaker uncle.

Mead said he’s watched a couple of British stagings of the play recently, but didn’t care much for either. Both tended to play up the language more than the action on stage.

He said for this production, they went with more clowning and more action. He said the costumes and set place the production in the 1920s or 1930s, with a heavy dollop of dandyism — “Keep calm and dandy on,” by the way, is the motto emblazoned on T-shirts made for the kids in the play.

Mead gives a lot of credit to his costume designer, Katelyn Jordan, who comes to Colony from Soldotna.

“She’s done all of our costuming this year and it’s just been wonderful,” he said.

In terms of crew, he also has a student lighting designer — Jennifer Rider — who might follow that passion through to college, and a student stage builder/welder, Storm Huffman, who also plays Malvolio in “Twelfth Night.”

“I train them up and they kind of own the place for awhile,” Mead said. “We’ve never had such a strong group of designers.”

Tickets are available online and at the school on show nights.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.