Virtual Theater Keeps Davenport North Students Involved In Acting
Leslie LaCorte, drama director at Davenport North High School, and her students are itching to get back to live performances.
That will happen March 5-7, with their first live play since the pandemic started – a comedic mystery, “The 39 Steps” – and the month will
Leslie LaCorte (right), speech and theater teacher at Davenport North High, with choreographer Steph DeLacy at the 2018 Iowa High School Musical Theater Awards.
also be special for 10 North students who will be part of a first-ever virtual Iowa Thespian Festival.
“The 39 Steps” will be performed at Paul J. Holzworth Performing Arts Center (limited to 25-percent capacity), 626 W. 53rd St., Davenport. Adapted by Patrick Barlow (from the novel by John Buchan and classic movie by Alfred Hitchcock), the play follows Richard Hannay along as he is dragged into this spy adventure – “it’s really just a bunch of silliness with a bit of mystery thrown in,” according to the synopsis.
LaCorte, a language arts/theater instructor at North High School, is working to keep her students excited about acting by turning it into a virtual experience.
Back in early 2020, students were working to stage a production of the large musical, “Into The Woods,” but then the Covid-19 virus began to spread. The resulting pandemic made it necessary to cancel the production.
“We kept up rehearsals online,” she said recently. “We thought things might get better, but it became clear that the show just had to close down. Kids had even built the props at home. One had built a cow called Milky White for the show! We kept the cow – we couldn’t bear to get rid of it.”
“Into the Woods” would have been performed in early April, after rehearsing since January. They closed the school on Friday, March 13.
Davenport North theater students will perform the mystery farce “The 39 Steps” on March 5, 6 and 7.
They kept rehearsing online over the summer, until the seniors left for college, LaCorte said this week. “At that point, everybody knew there was no way, because there was no way to work around the seniors’ schedules, but it was just a way for the kids to stay in touch with each other.”
“It was technically rehearsal, but really it was more a morale booster,” she said. The Davenport North musical is usually in the spring.
The straight play “The 39 Steps” would normally be a fall show, but they couldn’t rehearse yet in the fall, LaCorte said. For this one, they didn’t need a set, and she got 25 students to audition, with most all of them in the play.
“We didn’t turn anyone away,” she said, with about 15 in the cast (playing over 150 zany characters) and the rest working tech. They started rehearsing in early February, with students wearing masks.
“The nice thing about this show, at one time there’s never more than four people on stage,” LaCorte said. “It’s not an ensemble piece; the kids are not on top of each other. Same thing for our musical – we chose a musical for later this spring we can rehearse in small pieces.”
That one is Jason Robert Brown’s “Songs for a New World,” to be done in mid-May, which they can stream online. North could not get streaming rights for “The 39 Steps.”
In their 800-seat auditorium, they will only fill about one-quarter capacity, LaCorte said, noting no tickets will be sold at the door. For “Songs for a New World,” they’ll do the same thing, but they have a license to livestream it as well.
They’re planning to not use masks for performances. “I’m hoping since the governor said theatrical performers don’t need to be in masks, I’m
The Holzworth Performing Arts Center at Davenport North.
hopeful that’s enough to make sure we don’t have to do it,” LaCorte said.
All patrons are required to wear masks for the duration of their time in the auditorium facility. The performers will NOT be wearing masks, and there will be no concession sales.
“The 39 Steps” has had a few online rehearsals, with most in-person. “It’s definitely not the same for them – it’s hard to run lines online, and visualize, because they’re sitting in their bedroom,” she said.
For seniors last year, it was very disappointing to not do “Into the Woods,” but they appreciated LaCorte for trying as long as they could. “That’s a great show to showcase lots of different performers and we had a fantastic cast,” she said. “But four or five of our key leads were graduating seniors.”
“The other thing that was really disappointing for them was the end-of-the-year banquet. They didn’t get to do high school musical theater awards, none of that panned out for them either,” LaCorte said. “So they lost out on a bunch of fronts, and that was a bummer. We did a virtual banquet; it turned out nice. They can always go back and watch it if they want, which we never have done.”
North’s theater program has had success at the Iowa High School Musical Theater Awards in Des Moines. In 2017, it won Outstanding Overall Musical Production for “In the Heights”; in 2018, they nabbed the same honor for “Les Miserables,” and in 2019, earned a Distinguished Scene, “Jolly Holiday,” from “Mary Poppins.”
Last year’s awards were canceled, and the Iowa Thespian Festival would have taken place this past November, but both the International Thespian Festival and Iowa event became virtual festivals. The fall event was postponed for a virtual one throughout the month of March.
Festival moves online for month
LaCorte is chapter co-director for Iowa Thespian Festival and normally they have a two-day festival at University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. UNI even canceled their entire theater season for 2020-21, she said.
The Iowa Thespian Festival will be conducted online throughout the month of March.
“There will be events throughout the week for every week in March,” LaCorte said. “We have amazing presenters lined up for every Wednesday in March, which is super cool. The bonus to Covid is, we have access to performers and designers and technicians who right now can’t work. So it’s like, can you give us a Wednesday night?”
On Wednesday, March 3, there will be a talk by Iowa’s own Andy Grotelueschen – “From Iowa to Broadway.”
A Clinton High School alum, he earned a Tony Award nomination in 2019 for his appearance as Jeff Slater in “Tootsie: The Musical” on Broadway (a role made famous in the 1982 film by Bill Murray).
He has appeared Off-Broadway and around the world in Fiasco’s “Into the Woods,” at Menier Chocolate Factory (London), Roundabout Theatre Company,
The annual Thespian Festival is usually in November at the University of Northern Iowa.
McCarter Theatre Center, and Old Globe (earning a Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Revival and nomination for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Musical), and also appeared on Broadway in “Cyrano de Bergerac.”
Grotelueschen’s regional credits include Yale Repertory Theatre, American Repertory Theater, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Folger Theatre, Trinity Repertory Company, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Guthrie Theater, and across the country with The Acting Company.
He is a graduate of Marquette University, with a master’s in acting from Brown University/Trinity Repertory Company.
Among the four nationally recognized artists doing Wednesday workshops is Nathan David Smith, a native of Grinnell, Iowa, who’s an actor, producer, playwright currently based in New York City. He holds a BFA in musical theatre from Drake University, and is also an alumni of the National Music Theater Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center.
Smith was part of the first national tour of “The Office! A Musical Parody.”
“We wanted to get people where maybe their names are celebrities,” LaCorte said. “We have a really nice slate, but we don’t generally get – we can’t pay their flights when we do a festival. We’ve had people come in who were willing or maybe had family in Iowa, and we’ll just pay their other expenses. This way, they don’t have to travel.”
LaCorte’s interest in theater began in college (at Western Michigan and later St. Ambrose), when she became involved with set design and the technical aspects of products. She worked as a stage manager for productions, and her love of theater continued to grow. She received a master’s degree for teaching theater from Wayne State in Michigan.
A new event at the virtual Iowa Thespian Festival is a Playworks Competition, where students could submit their original one-act plays. No Davenport North students competed. There have been student playwriting programs at International Thespian Festival.
Clinton, Iowa native Andy Grotelueschen will give a virtual talk on March 3 for the Iowa Thespian Festival.
Because it’s virtual this year, it only costs $10 per student (compared to $100 a typical year, plus hotel and transportation costs), LaCorte said.
“The platform for the festival is Zoom, with workshops and pieces submitted by video,” she said.
Participants in the festival have access to workshops led by theater professionals and performances from schools around the state. They also audition for thespian and college scholarships, and showcase their talents in a program called the Thespy Awards.
LaCorte noted that many kids these days are developing their theatrical skills without even knowing it, thanks to their regular creation of online videos. “Some of these kids post Tik-Tok videos 20 times a day,” she said. “They also know how to edit their videos and upload them to YouTube.”
North High School has performance projects in store for the future, and students who wish to participate in the school’s projects should visit http://davenportnorthdrama.weebly.com/. On that page, they can download and fill out forms that can help them to proceed, and to decide how they want to be involved. The forms include a consent form that interested students need to share with their parents.
“Leslie LaCorte is an amazing teacher who has taken our theater program to amazing new heights,” said Jay Chelf, Principal of North High School. “The shows that she and our students have put on are second to none.
“The number of students involved in theater continue to rise as more and more students want to be involved,” he said. “There is a lot of pride in the actors, the set designers, the set builders, and all of the other pieces that it takes to put on a top-notch show. Mrs. LaCorte is dedicated to all North students and works very hard every day to help all students be successful and enjoy high school.”
LaCorte also teaches speech at North. It’s a good class for introducing kids to the business world,” she said. “In speech class, they can learn and practice skills they will need to use at job interviews, and to give presentations at work. For some kids who seem shy, you think it might be hard for them, and it’s great when they come through better than you thought they would.”
Performances for “The 39 Steps” will be at 7 p.m. Friday, March 5 and Saturday, March 6, and 2 p.m. on Sunday, March 7. Tickets are $10 for adults, $8 for students and senior citizens, available HERE. To find out more about the school, visit http://www.davenportschools.org/north/.
