OHIO Lancaster Theatre students prepare to astound audience at Lancaster Festival

The enthusiasm for theater is immediately apparent in the room when speaking to any of OHIO Lancaster Theatre students on campus as they prepare for an upcoming performance of Beauty and the Beast. Victor Jones has led the OHIO Lancaster Theatre program for 15 years, producing mainstage shows during the academic year and one large summer stock show in conjunction with the wildly popular Lancaster Festival.

This year, Jones has taken this production to another level thanks to a large anonymous donation to the Lancaster Theatre program. When considering how to use the funds, Jones decided that this summer it was time to give himself a break and not direct the show and simultaneously build the set. “This was initially a very selfish reason,” says Jones “I’ve built 52 main stage sets in 15 years. I'm not building a set this summer; I'm going to rent it somehow!”

As a result, audience members of Beauty and the Beast will have the pleasure of enjoying the professional touring production set that Jones was able to rent, as well as upgraded costumes and a live orchestra, all thanks to the anonymous donation.

In addition to the heightened spectacle, the partnership with Lancaster Festival brings another layer of exposure for the theater program. Beauty and the Beast will perform once this Sunday, July 21 at 2 p.m. as the festival’s main event, then pause until the festival completes, and open again on July 28 for a run of two weekends.

Jones explains that the support and ticket sales that are generated from the summer “sustains the entire year. It pays for the licensing, the set, everything that we do… these shows are that important during the summer.”  The good news is the community has shown just how much they appreciate OHIO Lancaster Theatre’s partnership with the festival. “Tickets are selling like crazy. We've sold a thousand already,” said Jones last week.

Lancaster Theatre also provides a valuable outlet for main campus and regional campus theater students to come together and work in an experiential summer stock environment in the middle of a large-scale performance festival.

Emma Clement, a fourth-year student in middle childhood education, has been involved with Lancaster Theatre for several years, Beauty and the Beast will be the fifth show she has stage-managed. Clement sees parallels between the experience of learning to be a stage manager and her future career in education. “There are similarities I think that I've noticed. I’m kind of in charge of the cast and being in charge of a classroom is a little bit the same, just like making sure that everybody knows what they're doing.”

She also has a similar nervousness managing people in both a theater environment and the classroom. “I'm like, wow, this is a very grand set. There's a turntable on top of one platform, we really need to make sure that the actors are safe on that, and we have a whole bunch of falls, lifts, all that kind of stuff…  we make sure everybody's safe for it because I don't want anybody getting hurt, of course. It's gonna be great, I know that, but it's just a little nerve-wracking!”

Coming from Athens campus, third-year acting major Nick Foster has enjoyed the opportunity to stretch his chops within the unique limitations of portraying the Beast in costume. “It’s very fun to delve into this character that is kind of not human and really picking him apart,” explains Foster.

You can’t portray the Beast without being fully immersed in the character, which is assisted by the elaborate costuming and mask. This adds a new layer to acting for Foster who is not used to having his face obscured on stage.

“It is a little bit constricting because I’m a very expressive person,” Foster explains. “So, I have to use my body and sort of use my hands in ways that I don't usually do or use them in ways that could sort of communicate the emotion or my intention where my face is quite literally hidden. I have to be very specific on what I want to communicate with my body, because my face is out of the question.”

Both students feel that this is a show not to be missed.

Clement has enjoyed the many special effects in the show that she thinks will excite the audience. “We have fog to help hopefully hide all of the fun, interesting things like when the prince turns into the beast and Gaston's scene when he falls.”

Foster points to the quality of the production compared to the animated version most will have seen. “The amount of work to make the stage musical as magical as the animated film is astounding, honestly, it's a pretty good parallel. I think it translates really well to the stage.”

To get your tickets for Beauty and the Beast and learn more about OHIO Lancaster Theatre programming, visit https://www.ohio.edu/lancaster/theatre.

To learn more about the Lancaster Festival, visit https://www.lancasterfestival.org/.