SAUGUS — If you’ve been waiting for a musical where the Orange Dinosaur on Route 1 serves as a critical plot point, then you’re in luck, thanks to the Saugus Middle School Drama Club.
The Drama Club’s production of “The Grunch,” which opens Thursday, has a distinct Saugus spin, with several iconic landmarks featured on stage.
This year, the club primarily features students in 6th grade, a result of a downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Director Ali Mahon Paige, a drama teacher at the Middle/High School, who has led the Drama Club for nearly two decades.
“COVID definitely killed us and so we’re still in a rebuilding phase,” she said, noting that the program typically has over 100 students involved.
Mahon Paige runs the program alongside Erika DeFeo, an art teacher, who leads the crew section. There, students rotate between a number of different roles — helping to build sets and props, as well as creating the program for the show. On the night of the show, students on the tech crew will serve as ushers and sell tickets and concessions, DeFeo said.
Each aspect of the production is entirely student-driven, a fact Mahon Paige said was more important than the actual quality of the show.
“Things that you see on stage, a student can be sitting in the audience and be like, ‘I made that, I created that’ and that is more important to me than making a Broadway-level show,” she said.
The plot of “The Grunch” is similar to that of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” — but in this case, a musical is stolen. The show’s titular character, Rudy Grunch, portrayed by Maddie Sachs, the cast’s lone eighth–grader, hates musicals, and the night before the show is set to go up, steals everything.
The process of casting and crewing “The Grunch” began in October, with interest meetings and audition workshops, auditions occurring right before Thanksgiving and rehearsals beginning in earnest after that holiday.
From there, cast members rehearse four times a week for two hours a day — working on acting, singing, and dancing. Members of the crew meet just once a week, and students who work on both sides are required to make that five-night-a-week commitment, said Mahon Paige.
“Oftentimes we find that a kid that is maybe a little bit nervous to audition will come and do tech and then audition the next year,” she said.
One of the tech crew students, Briella Aguero, a sixth grader, said she opted to join the crew because of a love for drawing. While she isn’t in the cast this year, Aguero said an on-stage appearance might be in her future.
Both Mahon Paige and DeFeo emphasized the importance of the club, saying it helps students build community and provides them the opportunity to see a project through from start to finish.
“It is future planning skills, they’re figuring out long term planning, ‘I have to get to this and how do I get there?’, commitment responsibility, being able to express themselves, all of it,” said Mahon Paige.
