Welcome to the jungle
Brock Cantrell-Field and Zianna King, dressed as Pythons, drum during one of the jungle songs.
Katie Murk, from Missoula Children's Theatre, helps Makynna Lowry into her costume as part of Kaa the snake.
Katie Murk, from the Missoula Childrens Theatre, as Baloo talks with Mowgli, played by St. Regis student Dallas Yearout.
Young wolf pups Emma Hill and Kylee Thompson welcome a young Mowgli, played by Thomas Anderson, into the wolf pack.
Aaron Carty played a wolf pup in the play. In this season, he dances as the pack sings a song.
Tommy Yearout played the jackal and Keenan Ewalt played fierce tiger Shere Khan during the play.
Last week, a bunch of jungle creatures inhabited the halls of the St. Regis School. But the students were practicing getting into their roles for the production of The Jungle Book.
Dan Davidson and Katie Murk rolled into town with the Missoula Children’s Theatre and they brought a stage, scripts and costumes with them.
After holding auditions on Tuesday, the two had the rest of the week to get the students ready to perform before their parents and members of the community Saturday afternoon.
Students showed up in the gym on Saturday at around 11 a.m. to run through a dress rehearsal before putting on the final show. The students were excited to get into their costumes and before running through listened to a couple suggestions from Davidson.
“We want to treat this exactly like the real thing,” he told them. “So say your lines loud and confidently. And imagine there are five hundred people out there watching.”
The production told the tale of Mowgli, the man-cub, who grows up in the jungle and has to learn about the law of the jungle. As Baloo the bear puts it, “without the law of the jungle, it’d be a jungle out here.” The tale catches up with Mowgli who has just learned that the fierce tiger, Shere Khan, has returned to the jungle.
With the gym lights turned off, the kids gave the show a run through. It gave them an opportunity to practice their lines and to deal with the times they messed up. Outside of the dress rehearsal, Davidson said that they held two, two hour chunks of rehearsal time each day, though not everyone was at each rehearsal, which meant the dress rehearsal gave them an opportunity to figure out how the entire production worked together.
Davidson said that he and Murk have been doing The Jungle Book since around Christmas, but have been on the road with the company for about a year and nine months. Typically, they have about five days of rehearsal before the performance, but things were cut short last week with President’s Day falling on Monday.
Forty six students participated. Outside of actors to fill the roles in the production, students served as helpers backstage, changing the sets, and also served as assistant directors.
“It’s ridiculously fun,” Davidson said. “It’s so great because the kids are always excited about it and they do a really great job. They are always like, ‘we can’t do this in a week’ and we tell them, ‘yes, you can.’ And they do. It’s a neat process.”
Murk said that the kids are always successful.
“You set the bar and no matter how high you set it, they always jump to achieve it,” Murk said. “And they are learning so much through this theatre production. They learn self confidence and they work so hard to learn the script.”
Murk said that when coming in from the outside they don’t know the kids, which can be good, but also presents some challenges.
“We don’t know anything about the kids’ backgrounds so we get a clean slate, but it also means that we might not know what will best help someone, but you catch on pretty quick,” Murk said.
Both Murk and Davidson said that the kids at St. Regis were a wonderful bunch to work with.
“They’ve done a really great job with it,” Davidson said.