Lights (Back) Up: Wilbur Cross Students Return To The Stage

Brian Slattery Photos

Katherine Van Tassel and Nina Laverty.

I’m exhausted,” said Salvatore DeLucia of Wilbur Cross’s Lights Up Drama Club, but I’m absolutely riding on a cloud. I’m ecstatic. Because these kids are back on stage. It feels like it’s been forever, and at the same time, it feels like it was just yesterday, it was 2019, and we were performing Sister Act.”

Heather Bazinet and Salvatore DeLucia.

In returning to the Wilbur Cross auditorium for their production of Freaky Friday — running March 4, 5, and 6 at the high school’s auditorium — co-directors DeLucia and Heather Bazinet can take a victory lap, having shepherded Lights Up Drama Club through one production, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, canceled at the very beginning of the pandemic and a virtual showcase in 2021. 

How to Succeed getting shut down … that stuck with me for a while, and I know it stuck with the kids for a while. It really, really hurt.” The showcase, A Light in the Dark, kept the group together, but it’s not the same — live theater, with an audience, on the stage together, with the crew and the sets.”

With Freaky Friday, the drama club gets to have all that again.

This year, Lights Up has a new class of students involved in the club, many of them freshmen, and they’re doing great,” said Bazinet. There’s a whole new generation because we essentially jumped ahead two years,” DeLucia said.

Bazinet and DeLucia chose to do Freaky Friday in the fall. Freaky Friday began its life as a 1972 novel by Mary Rodgers, about a mother and daughter who magically and inadvertently swap bodies and end up having to live each others’ lives for a day. Disney has made it into a movie no less than four times, in 1976, 1995, 2003, and 2018, and created a musical stage version.

It’s the first contemporary show we’ve done,” DeLucia said, and it’s very close to our lives.” Both Bazinet and DeLucia have teenage children. I know the bickering that happens, but I also know the love that happens,” DeLucia said. In the musical theatrical version, the family — a mother, daughter, and a son — are still grieving for the loss of the father and husband of the family, even as the mother is about to get married. The father’s absence lends the comedy just enough weight to ground it. For me, when I first read the show, it really struck me, if something were to happen to me, what would it be like in that house with them?”

The show is also grounded by the contentious relationship between the mother and daughter, one that DeLucia thinks many families will be able to connect with — and laugh about — through their own experience. Yes, it’s a fantasy, and it’s got magical hourglasses, but really, it’s a story about a family, and the love that a parent has for a child, and the respect and admiration that a child eventually has for a parent. If you ask me, it’s the perfect show to come back with.”

But in the fall, when Bazinet and DeLucia were choosing the show, everything was so up in the air then,” Bazinet said. Were we going to be able to do a show?” Principal Edith Johnson insisted the show go on. She was totally on board. She loves our program and is really supportive.”

Some of the new members of the club are students who stepped forward, interested in theater; a few are seniors who, after two years of disruptions, finally have their shot at the stage. Other members were found almost by accident. Bazinet found one cast member, Juliana Garcia, while looking for another cast member who was late to rehearsal. Garcia inquired as to who Bazinet was looking for and why. When Bazinet explained it was for a musical, Garcia said, I want to do that!”

You’re kidding, right?” Bazinet recalled saying. But Garcia was serious. No, I do, I want to do that,” Garcia said. Similarly, Bazinet recruited Jahlil Coleman from a table she set up in the cafeteria. Garcia is now in the ensemble while Coleman plays Mike, one of the main characters’ prospective groom.

They held auditions in October and November and started rehearsals close to Thanksgiving, and have been going since then.” The omicron variant necessitated they start with masks, and at one point they moved from the confines of a classroom to the wider space of the auditorium. Quarantines from exposures kept a couple kids home for a couple weeks. The cast of 18 figured out how to double up roles to cover all the parts, and the seniors have doubled up a couple of the leading roles to give them each a shot in the spotlight before graduating. The students have also taken the reins in set design and construction.

It means the world to be able to give them this platform,” DeLucia said. This experience that they’re going to have, that they’ve been having — anybody who’s done theater understands. I still remember my high school performances, and it’s a big reason why I’ve always wanted to do this, because of what that does to somebody. Not only do you find your people, and you find your place, but it’s also something that you use to remind yourself that when things get hard, you can do this. New challenge — you can do this.”

Jahlil Coleman.

The production itself is the proof of DeLucia’s words. Nina Laverty and Katherine Van Tassell (the other leads, in alternate productions, are Shelagh Laverty and Millie Carlson) shine, utterly believable as daughter Elle and mother Katherine Blake, two strong, smart, and independent women whose similarities are the source of both their familiarity and their contentiousness. Mere minutes later, they’re equally adept at playing the characters swapped into each others’ bodies. Together they guide the show through its comedy of errors, as each proceeds, first, to quickly make a hash of the other’s life. For Elle, this involves having to deal with soon-to-be stepfather Mike, whom Jahlil Coleman subtly plays first as a nice-enough guy who seems at first perhaps in over his head, and later as a man who’s more observant than he first appears. Katherine also happens to be a self-employed caterer planning her own wedding with Torrey (Rose Bromage) while being covered by journalists Danielle and Louis (Juliana Garcia and Angelique Raudales) for an article that could make or break her career.

Noah Brown and Zara Baden-Eversman.

Katherine, meanwhile, is forced to navigate Elle’s complex social life in school, which includes chatty best friends Karli and Kitty (Mari Caldwell and Jada Parker), rivals Savannah and Monica (Javieliz Matos and Erin Palmer), and potential romantic interest Adam (Noah Brown), who gets a scene later in the show in which he gets to turn on his considerable charm for an unlikely cause.

Things come to a head between them at a parent-teacher conference addressing the fact that Elle is a talented but unmotivated student, and in an interview with the journalists that at first doesn’t go well. It’s only when little brother Fletcher, played with equal doses of innocence and eclecticism by Zara Baden-Eversman, goes missing that they find they have to work together.

As strong as the leads are, they’re buoyed by a versatile ensemble cast — including Claude Saunders, who plays four different roles with equal aplomb — that switches seamlessly from student body to catering staff to wedding guests.

The energy the ensemble brings to the show, along with dynamic staging — particularly a scene involving a scavenger hunt in which the auditorium is lit mostly by cell phone lights — keeps this fleet Freaky Friday moving at a bright clip, enough to keep the laughs coming, but also with enough time to appreciate the heart behind it all, the reminder that even in the most fractious times, a small flicker of illumination can see us through.

Freaky Friday runs at Wilbur Cross High School on March 4, 5, and 6. Visit Lights Up Drama Club’s website for tickets and more information.

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