Local students to share their love story

By M. Patricia Titus
Staff Reporter

Students at Sussex Central High School are preparing to portray love on the stage with a March 31 performance of a student-produced cabaret.

The love they show won’t only be in the form of their musical performances this Friday. It will also be shown in the simple fact that the students have made the effort to produce the show on their own — in addition to two official school musicals this year — as an outgrowth of their own love of the theater.

SCHS junior Zack Lynch is the director of cabaret, titled “Every Story is a Love Story,” and his own story isn’t unique among the school’s theater students, who gravitate to SCHS as a bright spot in school district where drama instruction is a rare commodity. The Fenwick Island resident explained, “Sussex Central is the only real place that has a theater department in lower Delaware.”

In Lynch’s case, after two years at Sussex Tech, he was ready for something different, something that better suited him and his goals. “Acting is something I always wanted to do,” Lynch said. “And when you go into the professional world, they basically require you to have taken classes. This is something that will get us better prepared for college.”

After taking private voice lessons from SCHS Voice Director Becky Hale, his sights were set on attending SCHS and its drama program. “She was definitely pushing to get me into the school,” he said of Hale.

For drama instruction as part of his high-school career, it was really his only choice in the county school system. Efforts are ongoing to bring a full-fledged drama program to Indian River High School, which would have been far more local to the Fenwick Island resident, but they have met with little success thus far.

In Lynch’s case, that means he headed to SCHS instead of attending IRHS, as he might have done. “I definitely would have,” he said of the idea of attending IRHS instead. “I would have at least saved some money on gas,” he added with a chuckle.

As it stands, Lynch was drawn to the Voice for Theater Majors program at SCHS. Hale was in her first year of teaching the class there, and Lynch was eager to participate in that class — and more.

“Central was doing two musicals — ‘Sweeney Todd’ and ‘Fame’ — and we were preparing at the beginning of year for auditions for the musicals. At the end of the summer, I came to (Hale) with the idea of doing a cabaret with the class,” he explained.

“As an extension of the class, it’s a way theater kids and people interested in Broadway repertoires can practice while learning classical training and theory,” he noted. And between the class and student productions, “People are slowly starting to pick up the things they need to be a musical theater major.”

Once the seed of the idea was germinated, the students focused on the format of a cabaret. Lynch explained that the form is best known from New York City. “Most of the Broadway actors have restaurants where they go to perform, and they perform a cabaret.”

“It’s a set of songs — not just a concert — an evening of theatrics and music and dance. If you’ve ever seen the movie ‘Cabaret,’ it takes place in the Kit Kat Club,” he elaborated. “And the cabaret is generally performance-driven, from a story or an emotion or a general theme.”

In the case of the SCHS cabaret on March 31, the students will be expounding on the theme of love, in all its forms, shapes and textures. Each of the 11 performers will take an aspect of love — physical love, pure love, friendship love and unrequited love, among others — and will perform musical numbers that coordinate with their selected emotion.

“We sat down as a group of students and bounced around a lot of ideas,” Lynch said. “We went from having a full-fledged show with a script and dance routines.”

But there the original idea went awry, he noted.

“Once we looked at a whole, it was losing the intimacy of what we had described at first,” Lynch said. “A cabaret is really the audience and a performer, as themselves, conveying an emotion to the audience. So we sliced and diced from original outlook, down to a cabaret based on the idea of a show about love.”

Lynch said the final incarnation of the production includes a performance by Britney Proudfoot “with an older type of song, portraying an older woman who definitely doesn’t have love in her life.” That includes the song ‘A Hundred Easy Ways to Lose a Man,’ part of a depiction of what Lynch calls “spinster love.”

“I portray confused love,” he noted. “My character is confused about whether he wants to commit to love, what type of love he wants, who he wants to be with.” And the song “A Step Too Far,” from “Aida,” is about a love triangle and is performed by a small group of students.

“One of the great things about this show is you can see all these kids working together but keep the same general emotion,” Lynch added.

The students are the main movers behind the production.

“Mrs. Hale wanted us to be involved. She wanted us to take our own initiative. That was a main goal of the class,” Lynch said. “She wanted us to be self-motivated enough to do our work and do quality work that makes everybody look astounding. If we work up to full capability, we can be astounding,” he enthused.

That’s another aspect of why the high-school junior thinks the SCHS program – and theater offerings in the schools, in general — are so important. But with the program already in existence at SCHS and students from around the Indian River School District attending the school just for the program, is there really a need to expand theater training to the district’s other schools?

“Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes,” Lynch said. “There is so much stuff that we need to learn. There are kids who are real artists. … I feel like there is a lack of student art or ability for students to be in a performing arts program, which is very much needed.”

And that need is not only not being met as well as it could, he believes, but is even threatened at its current level.

“Slowly, programs are being cut to nothing,” Lynch said. “First there were rumors of a cut to SDSA (Southern Delaware School of the Arts). Now there is a rumor of a cut to the dance program here (at SCHS). What are kids like me — who want to do this for a living — going to do if there’s nothing for us in this county?”

“I went to Sussex Tech for two years. It just did not work out. I finally found my place here. I found something I want to do,” he said. “If this stuff gets taken away, there will be talented people with nowhere to go.”

Not only does a lack of theater options in high school affect the students’ high-school careers, he said, it also has a long-term negative affect on their lives instead of what could be a real positive.

“People think that we can just go ahead and be kids. But once we get to college, it’s a reality check,” he explained. “But if you have time in high school where you take responsibility for yourself, it teaches kids how to be productive and that they can actually can accomplish something.”

“We had times in preparing the show where we wondered if we could pull it off,” he said. “But we all just pulled everything together and now we have a very good show planned.”

Members of the community will have a chance to take in those young performers at their only public performance of “Every Story is a Love Story,” on Friday, March 31, at 7 p.m. at Sussex Central High School. Admission costs $3 for students or $5 for adults. The students will also be performing the cabaret for their fellow students this week.