When Ryan Brown graduated from Bow High School 14 years ago, he asked his parents for a graduation present – and it was a pretty big one. But it wasn’t something like a new phone, a car or a computer.
It was a theater company.
RB Productions was founded by Brown in 2003, with the help of his parents, as a main stage theater company, with the mission of supporting young, aspiring thespians in Greater Concord. Brown worked to build RB for years, putting on shows like Footloose and Godspell, and starting a youth theater program.
But when it was time for Brown to head off to college, he asked his old theater teacher from Beaver Meadow School in Concord, Clint Klose, to take over.
“He asked me if I’d be willing to take the company on,” Klose remembered on a recent Monday afternoon in his office at the Capitol Center of the Arts in Concord. “And 14 years later, here we are.”
Klose, who says theater has always been in his blood, just finished his 25th year as a music teacher at Beaver Meadow, where he started the Student Actors Program, a theater group for grades three through five. Klose has also acted as theater director at both Rundlett Middle School and Concord High School over the years. But RB has always been special part of his work, he says.
RB Productions has come a long way since Brown’s departure. Enrollment and show attendance has more than tripled, Klose says, and the company has also started a theater summer camp program that supports 150 students and puts on at least five shows every season.
This summer, RB Productions will be putting on Elf Jr. the Musical, Mulan, Willy Wonka Junior, James and the Giant Peach and The Jungle Book. Mulan and Willy Wonka are shows the company has put on before, Klose said, but the others are all new. RB will also hold a three-day Broadway performance workshop this weekend, bringing in New York talents such as Mandy Gonzalez, who starred as Elphaba in the Broadway musical Wicked, to teach the kids a thing or two.
Part of RB Productions’ challenge is catering to student thespians’ busy summer schedules. For this reason, casting for all the summer shows is completed in early June. After the auditions, the student actors are responsible for coming to the first rehearsal with the script and songs memorized.
Then they have a week to pull everything together.
“Kids show up on Monday for their first rehearsal, and we perform Friday and Saturday,” Klose said.
Despite the quick turn around, Klose said that in all his time the company has never had an issue with kids or anyone not knowing their parts by the end.
“They’re like sponges, they pick it up very, very quickly,” Klose said.
Jagger Reep, an 11th-grader at Concord High School who will play the lead role of Buddy the Elf in Elf this July, said it’s the loving community of RB that helps everything come together.
“We always come in nervous the first day, but it always comes together in the end,” Reep said.
To help ease the stress of the fast deadlines, the staff at RB tries to repurpose as many set and costume pieces from Concord High School and Beaver Meadow Elementary as they can.
“Without some of that prefabricated material, we would never be able to put this together in a week,” said Jordan Tankard, who designs the sets.
Another piece of what makes RB special is the family-like feel of the company.
“You get this group of people together, and they become your family within one week,” said Sarah Nolin, 18, who has been participating in RB shows for 10 years. “Even if you’ve never seen these people before, as the program becomes more popular, and you participate in more and more, you start to see the same people over and over again and you get to know each other really, really well.”
Cheryl Lampron, who has been working as the costume designer at RB for nine years, knows this better than anyone. Lampron started helping out with the Student Actors Program when her daughter, Meg Lampron, was in elementary school.
Last summer, Lampron’s daughter, Meg, directed one of the camps’ shows on her own.
Lampron said this isn’t too unusual at RB.
“Almost our whole staff here has come up through RB, starting as actors. And many of them have moved on so they’re either in the business or, like my daugher, who just graduated stage management at Greensboro College, is doing an internship now because of what she started with RB and SAP.”
“Clint has been a mentor for a lot of these students, and Meg has just been one of them,” she said.
Klose said he likes to think of RB as a summer training ground for students who are involved in theater groups during the school year. When students go back to their schools or their community theater groups, he hopes they will think of the summer they spent with RB.
“We’re hoping that they can take all of the tools they learned during the week at RB that makes them a better, stronger performer and more confident in their auditions so they can get some of those parts that they wait for,” he said.
(Leah Willingham can be reached at 369-3305 or lwillingham@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @LeahMWillingham.)