Earlier this month Peter and the Starcatcher took the stage in CSD’s very own black box theatre.  The show proved to be massively successful over the days it played, Oct 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th.

Peter and the Starcatcher is a Tony-winning play that follows the story of a young boy that grows up to become Peter Pan. The show provides backstory to the beloved characters we know and love, such as Tinker Bell and Captain Hook. This show marked the return of Spartan theater post pandemic. 

But how did CSD’s production come to be?  How did theatre in the middle of a global pandemic bring us together? And how did CSD’s cast and crew of Peter and the Starcatcher overcome multiple production obstacles?

With only a couple of songs and some musical underscoring, Peter and the Starcatcher “kind of fit the bill in terms of being a good middle ground [between a musical and a play] that I felt like we can do well,” Melissa Ohlman-Roberge, CSD theater teacher, remarked. And with that, the fall show was set.

“We very much wanted to perform without masks on,” Roberge explained.  So they decided to host the show at Spartan Park.  However, deciding to do the show at Spartan Park came with its own set of challenges.  It raised questions like “where is the electricity coming from? Where are the lights coming from? Where does the sound come from?” and “how do you make a non theatre space into a theatre space?”

Regardless of staging and electricity challenges, the biggest challenge by far was losing a year and a half due to Covid-19.  “There has been a really steep learning curve because most of the class is quite young,” Roberge noted.  Normally, upperclassmen serve as mentors for the younger incoming theatre students.  However, since underclassmen lost a good portion of their theatre experience, they had to do a lot of learning “on the front end” in order to be the most effective in how they rehearse.

“When the emotion is too big for words, we sing.  When the emotion is too big for song, we dance.  And that’s where musical theatre comes from.”

Roberge has been directing at CSD since 2010 and has dedicated over 40 years of her life to theatre.  She has directed over 100 high school and local productions, with cast members of all ages.  

Prior to being a director at CSD, she “directed plays for the middle school and volunteered heavily in [her] kid’s classrooms.”  Other than theatre, however, Roberge has a passion for the importance of open ended visual art for kids.  She believes heavily in the “benefits that you get when you’re able to freely create as opposed to creating around the structure.”

Roberge is  definitely a very talented and accomplished creator.  “Joy Warner and the administration have been so brilliant in allowing me to build a program that goes beyond what a lot of high school programs are able to do.”