Fossil Ridge High School is taking its musical 'Alice By Heart' on the road this summer

Fossil Ridge High School is taking its fall musical production on the road this summer, packing up the set, costumes, lights and sound system for a June performance of “Alice By Heart” at the International Thespian Festival in Bloomington, Indiana.

The “rock musical,” as it’s described by Playbill, was one of nine high school productions — seven musicals and two plays — from across the country selected to perform at the prestigious event June 23-29 at the University of Indiana.

“It’s kind of a glimpse into what the professional world would be like, because there’s a lot of travel with the professional world,” senior Cooper Hand said. “Now, we’re experiencing what it’s like to need to travel to perform instead of just the safety net of performing in our own school.”

Before loading all that equipment on farm trucks provided by the family of the musical’s lead actress, junior Hannah Schnorr, and driving it halfway across the country, the school will hold “encore” performances May 9-10 at Fossil Ridge. Tickets can be purchased online at frhs.booktix.net. The musical’s licensing company, Musical Theatrical International, granted the school the rights for the additional performances for free, director and theater teacher Mikayla Assmus said. So, all proceeds from ticket sales will be used to help cover expenses associated with the trip. Donations are also being accepted through the school's singing and theater booster group.

Thirty-nine students and 20 adult volunteers, including Poudre High theater director and teacher Joel Smith and a few of his students, will travel with the show to Indiana, Assmus said. The trucks will head out a few days before the two scheduled performances — a matinee and evening show — June 24 at the 3,200-seat IU Auditorium.

“It’s a beautiful theater,” said Schnorr, who attended the event last year to compete in the Thespy Awards for outstanding performance, technical work, writing and filmmaking by high school members of the sponsoring International Thespian Society, according to the International Thespian Festival website.

Fossil Ridge choir director and teacher John Garner is a regular attendee, and Assmus has gone with a handful of students each of the past two years.

More: Fort Collins High, Lesher orchestras earn right to perform at Music for All National event

The high school performances, Garner said, “are some of the very best shows I’ve ever seen. I’m pretty critical, but they’re as good as what you see on Broadway there, and some of the kids walk right off the stage there and move right onto a Broadway stage.”

Eight or nine of the students in the show will also be competing in the Thespys during the weeklong festival, Assmus said. The International Thespian Festival also includes dozens of workshops run by professional actors, set designers and other industry professionals, as well as college auditions. Hand, who plays Alfred Hallam in “Alice By Heart,” and Parker Cropp, who plays the Queen of Hearts, are singing “Therapy” from the musical “Tick, Tick … Boom” in a Thespy Award competition.

Fossil Ridge originally performed “Alice By Heart” on Nov. 30 to Dec. 2 and submitted a recording of its opening-night performance to the festival for consideration. That was the worst of the three performances, Assmus and the student cast members said before, but the only one that met the festival’s deadline for audition submissions.

Still, the show was given a score of 49.3 out of 50 on the rubric used to evaluate audition submissions, Assmus said.

“Alice By Heart” was created by American singer-songwriter Duncan Sheik, with lyrics by Steven Slater, and first performed in London in 2012, according to Playbill, a monthly theater publication. Fossil Ridge will be the first high school to ever perform “Alice By Heart” at the International Thespian Festival, Assmus said.

“It’s such a great opportunity, and I’m so ecstatic that we get to share our show with the country,” said Cropp, a senior.

Schnorr, Hand and Cropp all had major roles last summer in the Poudre School District show “Mama Mia!” that included performers from five of the district’s six comprehensive high schools. And, like the rest of a talented and tightknit Fossil Ridge theater crew, they also had key roles in last spring’s production of “Bright Star” that earned the right to perform at the prestigious Bobby G Awards, recognizing outstanding high school musical theater production in Colorado.

Schnorr plays Alice Spencer, a young girl forced to take cover in a London Tube station during a World War II bombing. Alice’s friend, Alfred, is dying of tuberculosis and quarantined from others in the station, according to a summary on the licensing company’s website, mtishows.com. Alice urges Alfred to escape with her into her favorite book, “Alice in Wonderland,” and the people in the shelter begin to change into characters in the book.

“The show’s about how Alice learns to cope with her friend dying, and she’s learning how to grieve and move on, and she goes through that with ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ a version of it; her version,” Schnorr said.

More: Boltz Middle School orchestra invited to perform at music festival in San Francisco

Students built the set last fall with pallet racking in hopes the show would be selected to perform at the festival, said set designer Alexa Fritzler, a senior. The pieces, including a perch she built that allows the Chesire Cat to climb up out of the audience’s view and seemingly appear out of nowhere, fit together like a puzzle to create the finished product. Props and other pieces were also designed so that they can be used as different items in different scenes.

Trucking it halfway across the country, though, along with as much of the lighting and sound controls and equipment they can bring, presents a new challenge for the students and their teachers. The trucks will head out a few days before their first performance, with the rest of the travel party scheduled to fly to Indiana the day before.

Once there, they’ll have about four hours to reassemble the set, lights and sound equipment and test it all out in a venue more than five times the size of the 600-seat auditorium at Fossil Ridge.

“It’s a taste of what it would be like to be a professional,” Garner said. “That’s what a lot of them do; go to a space you’ve never been before — maybe you’ve seen pictures of it — and you’ve got to do your thing there and figure it all out in a short amount of time and be as professional as possible.”

The set sat in storage over the winter while students moved on to their next show, “Into the Woods,” which they performed earlier this month.

Once that show ended, it was time to shift gears. Not for a new show, as the students and staff usually do, but back to the one they did last fall.

“It’s so weird to unwrap it all again,” said Aderyn Ketchum, a senior who plays the Chesire Cat, as the cast was preparing to watch their audition tape of “Alice By Heart” before resuming rehearsals. “I have no clue how much I remember. I was so set on 'Into the Woods,' and that’s just what my whole entire mind was on.”

It is a difficult transition — for the actors, technical crew and the teaching staff. But it's one they’re all eagerly embracing.

“We’re just excited to do it again,” Hand said. “I’m honestly pretty confident, because, yes, there are a lot of pieces and a lot of parts to this show. But there’s also an equal amount of people, and each of us are so into the show that we’re all ready to put in as much work as possible and excited to put in that work.”

Reporter Kelly Lyell covers education, breaking news, some sports and other topics of interest for the Coloradoan. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com, x.com/KellyLyell and  facebook.com/KellyLyell.news. 

This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Fossil Ridge High School to perform at International Thespian Festival