Friday, Nov. 20, 2009

Los Banos High's fall play draws smaller crowd than expected

Los Baños High School's Performing Arts Group held its first production of the school year, "The Star-Spangled Girl."

Opening week was Nov. 13-15 at the school. The cast includes three students who auditions at the end of the 2008-2009 school year. Nine student crew members helped make the production a success.

The production, following Neil Simon's work, is a comedy featuring a love triangle mixed with some political commentary set in 1967.

"We had a great opening weekend," Advisor Gary Bettencourt said. "The kids did a great job."

Bettencourt said the turnout of audience members was less than the group is used to, but they were excited for the successful run.

What made this production different than any other at the high school was that it included a guest director; Julie Heras, a former Tiger and current senior at CSU Stanislaus.

"She's one of the founding members of the organization and she asked if she could do a senior project with us," Bettencourt said. "It worked out really well. She suggested this production and I thought it would be easy for her to manage with the small cast her first time out."

Bettencourt said the small cast and the approval of bringing Heras in to direct gave him time to work on the group's next "big" production, Clue, set to open in March of 2010.

"I think this production was a good fit for us," he said. "It's the third Neil Simon production we've done and the style really fits us. We do really well with comedy."

The production will run on campus again Nov. 21 at 7 p.m. and Nov. 22 at 4:30 p.m.

"We're looking forward getting it done, closing it out, wrapping it up and starting all over again in march," he said.

--Samantha Salas