Schools
Dunedin High School Drama Students Prepare for "Little Shop of Horrors"
The play will be performed three nights next week with some 35 students involved.
Dunedin High School has one of the top drama programs in the county. Rarely a week goes by where students aren't performing in some sort of play, comedy, musical or in a competition of sorts at St. Petersburg College or in Tampa.
Of all the productions the students put on, this production is the highlight of the school year. The three-night performance next week of ends what was a 10-week period of auditions, rehearsals, production design and of course, singing, among 35 students who act, sing, produce and are stagehands.
"That's a lot to do," said Gerald Durst, the drama teacher at Dunedin High School who directed and designed the play.
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Durst noted that the wide variety of characters in the play will demonstrate how the actors can stretch themselves.
"In general, none of the kids are who they are," Durst explained. "No. 1, they are teenagers and none of them are playing their age. There are no teenagers in the show's characters, which is very normal. But almost all of them have an accent or a character voice and very difficult props and wigs to work with because it is so visual.
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"They are bigger than life characters. Because of the four leads, they are singing constantly, there is singing throughout. It's not the usual Rodgers and Hammerstein play where main characters have two or three song breaks. They have about 12 lines and then they sing. They have another 12 lines and they sing again. They are constantly on."
There is so much singing that Durst prohibited his students from singing in rehearsal the week prior the play to preserve their voices.
The students who won the auditions for the top four parts are Paige Konger who will play "Audrey," Adam Zeph as "Seymour," Peter Bernard plays "Orin" and Zachary Kimball as Mr. Mushnik.
"Little Shop of Horrors" was an originally an off-Broadway play developed in 1982 by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, based on the 1960 dark comedy movie "Little Shop of Horrors." It's about a florist shop along skid row in New York where the worker at a florist shop, "Seymour," develops a plant that thrives on human blood.
The play will be held April 19-21. Each show starts at 7 p.m. and doors open at 6:30 p.m. Cost is $10 for adults, $5 for students.