Basking Ridge Teens to Perform in Summer Youth Theatre Show

This August, Basking Ridge residents, Loren Grace Donnelly and Devon Claire Donnelly, will be featured in a new, original devised musical, Throne Over. The Donnelly sisters, along with their cast mates, most of whom reside in Madison, created the musical over the course of a free, four-week Summer Youth Theatre program with professional actor, musician, and teaching artist Jane Keitel. The performances will be held in the Directing Lab at the Dorothy Young Center for the Arts at Drew University on Thursday August 4 at 7:30pm, Friday August 5 at 7:30pm, and Sunday August 6 at 2:00pm.

To get the creativity flowing in the first few sessions, the students worked from picture prompts, writing stories based on their chosen photos. The intricate and fully fleshed-out stories they created during these exercises showed off their incredible imaginations. Carolyn Bishop, of the show’s Assistant Directors, noted that, “we get inspired by them as much as we try to inspire them.”

Those early stories were woven together to create the plot of their musical. In Throne Over, we met a queen who is a bungling wizard - she accidentally turns her husband, the king, into a turtle when one of her spells goes wrong. The only way to break the enchantment is for her to step down as queen forever, but this leaves the position of Queen open for one of her five daughters to take. The princesses decide to hold an election to decide which of them will take their mother’s place on the throne.

This unique Summer Youth Theatre program gives kids the unique opportunity to be part of the creative process from start to finish. Loren Donnelly, the other Assistant Director, and a former participant of the program, said that this is, “a lot more fun than doing a play someone’s already written because you create it.”

The Dorothy Young Center for the Arts is on the Drew University campus at 36 Madison Ave. Madison, NJ 07940. Tickets to the performance are $10 for adults $5 for children, students, and senior citizens who do not live in Madison. For senior citizens that live in Madison, tickets are free. Madison seniors should call the Madison Senior Center at 973-593-3095 for more information on their free tickets. Tickets to this event are limited and reservations are required, walk-up tickets will likely be limited. To reserve seats, please call 973-514-1787 x31 or visit https://www.wtnj.org/madison-summer-recreation-shows/.

For more information on any of Writers Theatre’s programs, please visit www.wtnj.org, or contact Writers Theatre at P.O. Box 1295, Madison, NJ, 07940, 973-514-1787 x20 or info@wtnj.org.