Directors come full circle in Mountaineers’ ‘Narnia’

Kitsap Sun's preview by Michael Moore, May 22, 2013

Directors come full circle in Mountaineers’ ‘Narnia’

BREMERTON — The last time Jenny Estill and Amy Beth Nolte were involved in a production of “Narnia” at the Kitsap Forest Theater, they were performing.

“Amy Beth was Lucy Pevensie, and I was the littlest mouse,” said Estill, who was 8 when the Mountaineers Players last performed “Narnia,” back in 1996. “Amy Beth (who went by the surname Lindvall then) was 7.”

This time out, the two Kitsap Forest Theater veterans return as the brain trust for this latest mounting of the musical take on C.S. Lewis’ “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” the first tome in his “Chronicles of Narnia” series. Estill is directing at the Kitsap Forest Theater for the second time (the first was “Oklahoma” in 2010), while music director Nolte is a veteran of several recent KFT musicals.

Estill, who cut her theater teeth on the rustic amphitheater’s hard-packed dirt “stage,” said she and Nolte have two main challenges in their directorial roles.

“This is where we both learned to be theater artists,” she said. “This place is a village, and we really want to pass that along so that the young people here now will understand that this is something they can enjoy for a whole lifetime.”

“It’s a mix,” Nolte added. “Of course, we care about the professional quality of the show, but we’re both teachers, too.”

Tradition is not something they take lightly at the Kitsap Forest Theater, where the Seattle-based Mountaineers Players have been producing at least one musical a year since 1923 [note: except for 4 years during World War I].

The Kitsap Forest Theater, an amphitheater carved out of a rhododendron-riddled wilderness, seems an apt setting for a fantastical place like Narnia, which the four Pevensie children access through the back of their wardrobe. Unbelievably, Estill decided the venue needed even more trees than nature already had provided.

“We’re going to have some human trees,” she said. “They’ll be doing lots of things, including helping move the set. I’m a stickler about quick set changes.”

The trees, and all the story’s other fantastical characters, will be brought to life by veteran costumer Barbara Klingberg, who also dressed the cast of Bainbridge Performing Arts’ just-completed “A Chorus Line.” Choreography is by Lynda Sue Welch, with fight choreography by Ken Michels.

Estill’s also played a role in keeping things moving during rehearsals, when she says she’s been able to take over the role of the prompter, or the “book” (the person who sits in front of the stage with the script, nudging actors who might be struggling to remember their lines).

“I am the book,” she laughed. “I remember every word.”

Both Estill and Nolte, it turns out, have some deep roots in the story.

“Being Lucy when I was 7 changed my view of Narnia,” Nolte said. “That’s the magical thing about being young. You really can believe that you’re in Narnia.”

Estill said the show’s been on her to-do list practically since she served her mouse stint in 1996, letting it drop that whenever it came up in the Mountaineers’ rotation, she’d be happy to helm it.

“I’m just glad they didn’t do it last year,” she said of the 2012 season, when she was working in Ohio.

One of the biggest challenges for Estill has been to match the large, multi-generational talent pool who showed up for auditions with the characters, from the Pevensies right down to those human trees. Aslan the lion, the show’s most iconic role, was the final one to be cast, when Dave Holden (Ovation! Musical Theatre Bainbridge’s summer 2012 production of “The Pirates of Penzance”) was recommended by Mountaineers regular Jenny Dreessen, who will play the White Witch.

It isn’t lost on Estill that Dreessen also played the witch in the Mountaineers’ 2011 production of “Into the Woods.”

“She’s collecting the witch roles,” she said of Dreessen, whose daughter, Katie, is cast as Susan Pevensie.

“For our White Stag, we didn’t really have a dancer,” Estill said, “so we took Megan Castillo (who’s shone in several KFT shows) and cast her, and we just changed it from a dancing role to a singing role.

“The challenge is how best to use and showcase everyone,” she said.

In other words, you have to be able to see the forest for the human trees.

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