Ballina Players: Aspiring to a Totally Youth Production
Ballina Players has been producing an annual youth production since 2005, and gradually they’re moving closer to resident director of youth productions Mike Sheehan’s dream of an all-youth production. Geoff Marsh reports.
Youth productions are not rare - many companies have, as part of their program, a play or musical which features under 18’s, with maybe an adult role here and there. The concept being that the show becomes a “breeding ground” to expose young people to the life of an amateur production in the hope that they will feed into the company’s regular productions.
But what about the production team and technical crew? This becomes more difficult because most of the youth want to perform.
In 2005, Ballina Players (situated on the Far North Coast of NSW, and hour south of the Queensland border), under the suggestion of Sue Belsham, the then director of musicals for the company, decided to introduce a regular youth production, every January, into their program, starting with the musical Worzel Gummidge in January 2006. This musical featured mainly youth in the chorus, but with many adults in the Principal roles (and only adults in production team/technical crew/orchestra).
The current director of the youth productions, Mike Sheehan, was involved in this first production as Stage Manager, Production Manager and part of the cast. Since then, Mike has tried to involve youth as much as possible in the non-cast roles, having a dream that one day Ballina Players may be able to put on a production with under 18’s in all performing and non-performing roles. He has not been able to achieve this yet, but has had many productions with full (or nearly full) youth cast: Peter Pan in 2007; High School Musical in 2008; Aladdin Jr in 2010 (all youth); Bugsy Malone in 2011 (all youth under 15) and Grease in 2012. (The 2009 production of Annie was directed by Geoff Marsh.)
For nearly all these productions, Mike had a young choreographer, Jaime, and stage manager, Martine.
But in 2013 he got even closer. For their production of You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown all 32 performers are aged 10-17. As well, the sound desk is completely run by an 18 yr old, Sarah (with assistance from Luke, 24, and Amy ,19; the lighting board is controlled by 17 yr old, Amelia, with Hannah, 19, operating the spotlight; Amelia also assisted in erecting the lighting rig, and one of the four orchestra members is 19 yr old Dylan.
Some technical crew members have adult mentors in the pre-performance stage (Geoff Marsh in the Lighting Department & Jackie Reidy for Sound), but while the show is running, Amelia and Sarah are running their boards.
Mike realises that there is a long way to go to fulfil “the dream”, but says “if I could direct a show with all orchestra, technical crew and production team being 18 or under, I would be very happy.”
Images: The cast of You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown and 16 year old Amelia Perris operating the lights – 150 cues in 85 minutes.
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