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‘Dear Edwina Junior’: no adults allowed

By Loren Keller

“Dear Edwina Junior” might be the perfect musical for young performers.

Not a single adult will join them onstage during the six performances of the play at Linn-Mar High School beginning Saturday.

“The only adults that are even referenced in the script are never seen, they’re off stage. So every character has to be a kid,” says Theatre Cedar Rapids managing director Casey Prince.

Forty-eight kids between the ages of 6 and 14 have roles in the light-hearted musical that follows the adventures of advice-giver extraordinaire Edwina Spoonapple, who will be played by incoming Washington High School freshman Nikki Stewart.

When Edwina learns of a talent scout making a stop in her hometown, she scrambles to find a talent worthy of attention and decides to direct a neighborhood full of friends in her Advice-A-Palooza extravaganza.

“From a director’s standpoint that gives you the opportunity to give all sorts of solos—both vocal and dance— and lines to tons of different kids,” says Prince, who directed “Edwina” at Franklin Middle School a few years ago. “It’s a great show to get young people involved with but it still has a few meatier roles for older kinds to sink their teeth into.”

Most of the 48-member cast will share the spotlight onstage for the entire show and at the same time learn skills that will be valuable whether or not they continue acting as they get older, Prince says.

“If there’s anything that young people get out of a theater experience–since so many of them might not pursue it and maybe their thing will be trumpet or football—it’s an environment in which they become confident, good intellectual team players,” Prince says. “They learn improvising skills and how to be graceful under pressure and so many important lessons that they can take with them to other school activities as they get older.”

First-time TCR director Erica Jo Lloyd, who moved back to her native Cedar Rapids last fall after working at Living History Farms in Des Moines, says rehearsals—which have been ongoing since the beginning of June except for a week during the flooding—have been tailored to fit a variety of young attention spans.

“We have just two hours of rehearsals and it’s just about the right length of time for your 8- through 12-year-old kids,” she says. “Older kids could go a little bit longer but the younger one are lost after an hour.”

The large size of the cast wasn’t a problem “except when they would get talking,” Lloyd says.

“It’s more trying to keep the older kids interested and not leaving the little ones behind. You can only move so fast when you’re trying to keep six-year-olds up but then you have 14-year-olds who are bored out of their minds. It’s a lot of juggling and splitting up the group so we could work faster with the older kids on things and a little bit slower with the younger kids.”

Performances at Linn-Mar High School are set for 2:30 pm Saturday; 7:30 pm Sunday; 4:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Monday; and 4:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. The play runs a little over an hour. Tickets are $10; call the TCR box office at (319) 366-8591 or visit the Theatre Cedar Rapids web site.

Plenty of tickets are available as the production moved from the flooded-out Iowa Theatre Building, with a main-floor capacity of about 250, to the 700-seat auditorium at Linn-Mar.

“We’re hopeful people will come and check it out, because even if there are 200 people at the performance it will look like a very vacant auditorium because we’re in such a massive space,” Casey says.

With three different TCR performances set for Saturday, Casey says this weekend will be a kind of “litmus test” for the health of the organization uprooted by the flooding.

“We typically have maybe one to two things going on at any one given point. On Saturday, we open ‘Dear Edwina,’ we ‘re continuing the second weekend of ‘Disney’s High School Musical on Stage,’ and it’s the final performance of ‘Moving Home,’ the collaborative piece we’re working on at Brucemore,” he says. “So it’s been pretty crazy.”