Schools

Tickets For 'Rent' (School Version) Now on Sale

Rehearsals now underway for musical to be staged at Ridge Performing Arts Center.

Tickets sales and rehearsals are now underway for the school edition of "Rent," a musical to be presented by the Ridge drama club at 7 p.m. on March 4-5. The school's version will be staged at the Ridge High School Performing Arts Center.

The play is being directed by Megan Kern, theater teacher at the high school. All grade levels are in the cast of more than 60 students.

Tickets for "Rent School Edition" are available online on the Ridge Performing
Arts Center website. Tickets also will be sold at Ridge High School during lunch periods. Tickets are $16 for adults, and $12 for students and senior citizens.

Loosely based on Puccini's "La Boheme," "Rent School Edition" is a piece of musical drama that highlights the lives of a group of friends in New York City in the 1990's. Despite the struggles facing the group of eclectic artists and personalities, they become their own family as they deal with poverty and disease in playwright Jonathan Larson's award-winning play.

Auditions took place in December, and regular rehearsals began in early
January.  A team of educators from the school district is working
with cast and crew members, according to the staff. Along with Kern as director, Lyndsey Schaefer, a district vocal music teacher and professional performer, is the music director.

Ridge dance teacher Rachel Falis is the choreographer. Technical directors are Jason Stewart and Jameson Chin. David Kern, the Ridge PAC manager, is training students and assisting in the technical development of the performance.

Earlier this year, the Ridge Drama Club took trip to see "La Boheme" and the spectacle of that production inspired Megan Kern to include a large vocal ensemble, she said. Set designer Stewart created a set that includes the "tent city" widely referred to in the musical. The show has a cast of over 60 student actors, singers, dancers, and musicians, as well as a student crew to create, manage, and run the set, lights, and sound for the show.

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Among the main characters are Julius Trombino as Roger; Alex Ursino as Mimi; and Drew Gardner as Angel.

The Ridge production of "Rent School Edition" has been accepted to participate
in the Papermill Playhouse Rising Star Awards program, a statewide high
school recognition program for students and educators modeled after
Broadway's Tony Awards.

The production of the musical, and auditions for parts, had been briefly called off in December due to concerns about its themes of drug use, AIDS and homosexuality.

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The school administration announced on Friday, Dec. 17, that the production would be halted, Kern and students said at that time. However, Schools Superintendent at the next Board of Education meeting on the following Monday. Kern said she believed the administration had received an e-mail blast of objections to the play, which premiered on Broadway in the mid-1990s.

However, other members of the public, including students, then responded with a call for the show's return. "The show will go on," Goger later announced at the meeting. 

"We received a lot of correspondence objecting to the mature theme of the show," Goger said at the Board of Education meeting. "I canceled the show. That led to more correspondence."

Goger said she had been persuaded to allow the show to be staged at Ridge High School due to that impassioned defense, particularly students' eloquence in stressing the play's anti-bullying message and stated goal of practicing tolerance.

Goger said she also compared  a published school edition of the play with the original script for "Rent," produced on Broadway and in a movie version.

"The Broadway version is different from the school version," Kern said. A version of the script was rewritten for school audiences following Larson's death in 1996 the night before his play opened.

Earlier this year, the Ridge drama students staged "The Somewhat True Tales of 


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