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Students get ready for a rehearsal of "Mary Poppins" at South Coast Rep's Summer Conservatory
Students get ready for a rehearsal of “Mary Poppins” at South Coast Rep’s Summer Conservatory
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If your child is in need of an extracurricular activity and has expressed an interest in the arts, look no further than the South Coast Repertory Conservatory. With ten-week classes in the summer, fall and spring, and class composition divided into grades 3-4, 5-6, 7-8 and 9-12, students have the opportunity to explore the craft of acting in a safe and welcoming environment within their peer group, training on the stage of the Tony Award-winning theatre.

Each year a student is enrolled focuses on a different aspect of the process. For children, the first year emphasizes exploration, year two development and year three advanced training.  

 For teenagers, the three years hone in on the tools of acting, truth in acting and advanced training, respectively.

At the end of fall and winter sessions, the classes put on a demonstration of their in-class exercises for friends and family, and in the spring they go on one of SCR’s stages to exhibit their class projects. Students in their second year of the program also have the option of auditioning for the SCR Players (Junior, Teen and Summer), ensembles that perform fully produced plays in the Nicholas Studio.

Every year, the Summer Players, students specifically selected after their first year in the Conservatory, put on a fully mounted production in one of SCR’s theatres. On Aug. 8-9 and 14-16, the Summer Players performed “Mary Poppins” on the Julianne Argyros Stage. The summer show presents a dual role of both entertaining a usually full audience and providing an educational experience for the budding actors. The show is picked earlier in the year by the show’s director and the Theatre Conservatory Director Hisa Takakuwa with the intention of fulfilling these purposes.

Not only was Takakuwa enamored by the script and found the themes compelling for the young actors, she found “Mary Poppins” a worthwhile challenge to stretch the students’ skills and training. This particular show gave the actors a chance to work on the mechanics of dialect as well as focus on their tap dancing skills. And with the myriad scene and set changes and abundance of costumes, this is the largest physical production the program has ever done.

The summer show is also a chance to give less experienced actors a chance to try out for bigger roles. “Our Mary [Poppins] had never had a role of this size,” Takakuwa says.

Overall, the show promises a great time to both cast and audience every year. The audience is usually comprised of far more people than simply friends and family.

“It’s a great mix of people,” Takakuwa said. “We certainly get parents and family and friends who like to see the show, but we also have subscribers who like to see the shows…It’s a large variety of people, a nice range of audience.”