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Concept Statement, The Emperor’s Nightingale - updated March 28, 1999
Introduction
Each year Ferndale Repertory Theatre produces a children’s theatre piece as a companion to its mainbill Christmas production.  The ongoing problem has been casting and crewing such a production because of the weekday morning performances to which children are brought from their schools, and because of a trickier rehearsal schedule since the mainbill production is using the rehearsal space in the evening.  For this year, Artistic Director Marilyn McCormick and I discussed the possibility of making the children’s theatre piece a class in collaboration with College of the Redwoods.  This was intended to facilitate the planned creation, workshop, and rehearsal of the piece using students in the cast and crew.  All these sessions, therefore, could take place at CR during more normal school hours thereby alleviating the problems.  Unfortunately, for all our good intentions, the plans did not work as anticipated.  We still could not find an adequate cast early enough, had to postpone the class until later in the semester - closer to production time, and ultimately had to forgo the idea of creating our own piece and instead find an existing children’s theatre play to simplify things.  I discovered The Emperor’s Nightingale at Pioneer Play Publishing.  It was a musical play with an accompaniment CD available and a rehearsal tape included.  With a huge sigh of relief, we were on our way.

Concept & Goals
I had conceptual meetings with my costume/prop/set designer Vicki Young who was very excited about the project.  We agreed that we wanted to bring as much magic as possible into the production, considering the challenge of obtaining and holding children’s attention as well as the nature of this script.  Given the China locale and multiple settings as well as the theatricality of the puppets and transitions inherent in the story, we wanted to expand the magic even futher.  I communicated to her and my lighting designer that the characters in much children’s theatre, and especially this play, are very clearly drawn.  They are good or bad, sweet or sinister;  there is no grey area.  With this in mind, and given the colorful nature of period Chinese designs and clothing, we elected to utilize bold primary colors almost exclusively and very distinctive design elements with clean lines and edges.  The tone of the entire production was to be bold, bright, loud and briskly paced.

Challenges and Approach
Children’s theatre is in many ways its own animal in the genre of theatre.  To some extent it depends on your audience's age  (ours being primarily 8-12 year olds), but stylistically the choices made by all parties are often different than for other types of theatre.  One example is that children, unlike jaded adults, are much more willing to suspend their disbelief and accept the fact that a 2 dimensional painted object is a tree, or that a hat and cape on the evil villian is enough to disguise him from others.  However, while it affords this freedom, we can’t forget that a clear logic with consistency of elements and style must be maintained.  A second example comes in the acting style of children’s theatre.  Overall characters are drawn more broadly.  Not unlike comedy, this genre often relies on stereotypes but still requires an investment on the part of the actor to play the situation realistically, within the stylistic world of the play.   However, specific to children’s theatre is the need to play more of the character toward the audience.  The energy must be pushed forward into the house, especially with younger children who demand you keep their attention.  If actors start playing into profile too much, they will lose the audience interest.  An extreme example for very young audiences is the rule to deliver your lines front, and then relate to the character to whom you are speaking.  Contrary to more standard character interaction, this will help maintain the performer/audience connection.  To varying degrees, I utilized all of these strategies in this production.

Outcome
Considering our rocky start, the very late casting of one character (who subsequently had extreme difficulty with his lines and paraphrased much of the play through performances), I felt proud of this production.  Although I have performed in children’s theatre, this was my first true production of it and I enjoyed it a great deal.  This annual event always sells very well at FRT, but we had many parents and children expressing their appreciation for this production, saying it was the best they’d seen.  The cast managed for the most part to master the style of performance and interacted very well with the child audiences.