A small but appreciative crowd came out to opening night at the Port Hardy Secondary School theatre to see the Drama Club’s players perform.
They clearly enjoyed the performance enough to tell their friends, as the crowd swelled for the second night’s show.
The Drama Club performed Don Zoldis’ The Brothers Grimm Spectaculathon, a comedic and interactive performance tracing a thread through all 209 Grimm Brothers fairy tales.
As the narrators explained in the opening scene, the brothers collected and amassed a huge collection of classic tales. Many of these stories and characters are household names, like Hansel and Gretel or Rapunzel, largely thanks to Disney retellings, but these versions are tame imitations of the darker originals.
But the actors injected plenty of life into the darkness with lots of humour and audience interaction.
The cast was lead by co-narrators Brenna Clarke and Alex Howard, who bounced in and out of the action, driving the storyline as narrators before quick-changing and returning onstage as characters.
The audience got its share of roles too, as the leads assigned lines to sections of the audience, brought a “volunteer” onstage and ran up into the bleachers.
The supporting cast showed their adaptability throughout, racing through characters and costumes at breakneck pace.
Ably directed by student Leah Holmes, assisted by Craig Boyko, the small but talented troupe can give themselves a pat on the back for a fantastic performance of a challenging piece.
Here’s hoping for an encore from the club in the near future.