LA CENTER — The high school here hasn’t staged a bona fide musical play since 1996. Theater teacher Sara Rideout aims to change that this spring with “Peter and the Starcatcher,” set to run May 16 through 18.
To pave the way, Rideout and her acting students staged a fundraising anthology of make-believe musical sketches Thursday. They were make-believe because, if you’d cut the amplified music and silenced the rowdy audience, the only thing left would be students dancing and gesticulating and silently pretending to sing.
It was the sixth annual lip sync battle among La Center High School’s acting students, and the first time Rideout has made that battle into a public showcase and fundraiser. Admission was free, but the excited audience voted for their favorite lip sync stars by dropping cash into boxes and buckets. In the end, more than $2,000 was raised toward the considerable expense of staging May’s big musical production.
This production was big, too — because dancing and fake-singing for an audience of hundreds means really hamming it up. Some presentations were robust dance routines; others delved into characters and stories to silly or serious effect.
A song called “Cannibal” by Tally Hall was enacted by Evan Smith, desperately mouthing the words as he raced around the stage ahead of Kiersten Brightbill, giving chase with a scary-big knife. In the end, he gave up and she tucked in, unleashing red ribbons of fake blood. In “Under Pressure” by Queen, Joao Rizzo kept offering his heart to Abby Hollopeter, who had a nose in a book and couldn’t be bothered — until Rizzo shrugged and sidled away. That’s when Hollopeter suddenly came to life and raced offstage after him.
And in the hilarious “Never Get Married,” from the musical “Honeymoon in Vegas,” Sarah Hoppe just about stole the show as a hobbling old lady who dances like a showgirl while warning her son that there’s only one way to prove his love for mother.
Musical theater numbers loaned themselves to ready-made scenes and sketches; other scenarios were developed by the students. Reigning lip sync champ Kourtney Edington took a left turn out of comedy when she picked up a telephone and shared shocking news about college students gunned down by federal troops in 1970 in “Ohio,” the ultimate protest song, by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Then Edington dropped the phone, clutched her head and fell to her knees in a faithful reproduction of the famous photograph from that day in May 1970 — of a girl screaming over the body of her dead friend.
This was the same Edington who, minutes earlier, delivered a deeply silly rendition of comedian Adam Sandler’s Saturday Night Live song, “Lunch Lady Land,” which describes an uprising in the cafeteria.
Edington started acting and lip syncing when she was little, she said — but only at home, in front of the mirror, alone. Doing it in front of anybody at all, let alone a huge audience, would have been unimaginable for her not long ago, she said.
“I was pretty shy in elementary and middle school. It’s been the best thing in life to have the experience of getting rid of my shyness — I have faced my biggest fear,” she said.” Nowadays, Edington added: “I love the adrenalin. I love the rush of it.”
That’s what lip syncer Alex Wade said, too: “The more I do it, the more comfortable I get. I go all out. I don’t remember anything else. I’ve just got to go do it.”
Mercury mustaches
Many of La Center’s syncing lips were topped by thin black lines, honoring the late Freddie Mercury, frontman of the band Queen, who’s enjoying posthumous celebrity lately thanks to the biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Even Gracie Dexter wore a Mercury mustache while tearing through Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.”
Rideout structures her lip sync assignments around overall themes — like epic ballads and holiday favorites — and this year, the always dramatic Queen has been a great fit. “Their music is so theatrical, it really lends itself to this,” she said.
That was most obvious in the show’s grand finale, a group rendition of the song “Bohemian Rhapsody,” starring all of Rideout’s seniors and some juniors, too — all Freddied out in muscle T-shirts and moustaches (plus a hilarious mat of chest hair spilling out of Caleb Stenberg’s shirt) and operatically enacting the surreal tale.
“We do lip sync battles in class, but this year the performances are so extraordinary, so stellar, I thought, I need the world to see this,” said Rideout.
In the end, the People’s Choice award went to a brother-and-sister duo, Sam and Maryam Elkoshairi, for their “Night Boat to Cairo,” while a panel of judges chose Stenberg and Nyah Mertz to advance to a final championship round. They’ll sync it out with reigning champion Edington.
That final round is set for Feb. 13 during another interesting theatrical presentation at La Center: halftime during an anthology of five short, student-directed plays by Mark Twain.
