[Editor’s Note: This is the second of two parts. Part 1, “A Child Actor’s Paradise — They’re Playing Little Shop of Horrors This Weekend,” ran last Friday, Aug. 15.]
In the days leading up to the past weekend’s tripleheader performance of “Little Shop of Horrors,” two young women, Allison Weintraub and Sarah Schuessler with show business on their minds, maintained 4 watchful eyes from the same mid-auditorium seats, half a dozen rows removed from the gigantic stage at Hamilton High School.
Ms. Weintraub and Ms. Schuessler are prominent among the scores of adults who plunge into a terrifically challenging pool for 8 weeks very summer — employing a fingertip touch to teach 30 prospective actors, between the ages of 7 and 17, the fundamentals of theatre-craft.
Once the student actors find this Westside gem (at cclo.org), they stay, summer after summer.
The second thing that parents new to the program seem to notice is how mature, how disciplined the students are.
Even though all of the performers qualify as children, when an occasional visitor watches them swing through their paces, he is struck by how self-controlled and professional they are.
Therefore, to repeatedly refer to the production as a “children’s” show seems almost diminishing.
A Whole Experience
The first thing new parents notice is that placing their children in the program becomes a family commitment. “On the first day,” said Ms. Weintraub, “we tell parents that staging the production is not something we want to do, or can do, on our own. We tell them, ‘We need your help.’”
Ms. Weintraub spent 9 summers in Culver City and surroundings, acting with the workshop of the Children’s Civic Light Opera. She went away to college, and came home 3 years ago to direct and serve as an acting coach. Formally, she is known as Assistant to the Director, and the director is the Big Boss of these annual productions.
Ms. Schuessler, in her first year with the Children’s Civic Light Opera, earned her undergraduate degree in theatre at Northwestern University. She is in a master’s program at UCLA, and she worked with costumes for “Shop of Horrors.”
Boys, Where Are You?
If they were to hang out a “Help Wanted” sign, said Ms. Schuessler, it would be for boy actors.
Girls may be more naturally attracted to performing. That is one of the reasons “boys are in high demand in musicals,” she said. “When guys do come and find this, they soon find they are given cool responsibility. “Take Connor Northrup, who is in his first year. He plays our dentist.”
Ms. Weintraub said that Mr. Northrup is 17 years old, and his family just moved to the Westside from Texas. He was not expecting nearly as elaborate of a production.
Owning one of the longest resumes with the Children’s Civic Light Opera, dating back to 1989, Ms. Weintraub said that the company does not actually recruit. “I found out about it when my mom brought me to see a show,” she said. “I told her, ‘I really want to do this,’ and here I am. It’s mostly a word-of-mouth kind of thing.”
Return — and Return — Engagements
The bubbly and enormously energetic Diane Feldman Turen, the co-founder of the Civic Light Opera 21 years ago, and the director ever since, was feeling a little melancholy this afternoon.
The way you do at the end of a terrific vacation.
Staging “The Little Shop of Horrors” surely was no vacation. But she looks forward to each summer production, starting in June, the way others anticipate vacation.
