Students take centre stage

A well-padded Fat Sam (Pruittiporn Kerdchoochuen) hatches a plan against arch rival gang leader Dandy Dan (Daniel Eleveld) while Sam’s right-hand man, Knuckles (Decharuj Kulabusaya), looks on approvingly.— RICHARD HARPER Inset: Play director Tara Mooney— TERRY FREDRICKSON

Or, better yet, take them to a rehearsal like the one the learning post attended last month. That is where you see the qualities a successful performance demands – the teamwork, patience, concentration and determination to excel. The end result is a confidence and pride that would be difficult to replicate with a curriculum limited to academic classes.

The play was Bugsy Malone, a musical comedy adapted from the popular 1976 movie by the same name. Altogether approximately one-third of St John’s 206 secondary students were involved in the production, 43 of them on stage.

A significant number of the academic staff were also involved, logging long hours from the beginning of the term in September when the preparations began. Yet play director Tara Mooney downplays their importance.

“Everything you see about Bugsy Malone, the children have done for themselves,” she says. “Yes, the staff guided and they’ve given advice and pointed them in the right direction, but everything you see in terms of the set, the choreography, the acting, the music, is what the children have accomplished.”

Bugsy Malone is an ambitious play that would challenge schools anywhere in the world. There is certainly little in the play within the experience of St John’s predominately Thai-born cast.

Set in 1920s New York, it is the story of two rival gangs of child mobsters, each bent on topping the other. The action is fast and furious with the gangs going at each other with arsenals consisting of a mysterious splurge cream and the not so mysterious custard pie.

The music is jazz and the language is urban New York City (“New Yawk Sidy”). The play is three very substantial acts long, leaving the principal characters with hundreds of line to learn.

So why take on something so demanding?

“Why not?” responds Mooney. “Gangsters, children, custard pie, foam everywhere. It’s just a lovely musical. It’s got some great songs in there. It’s well known.”

Mooney’s confidence is also based on St John’s strong tradition of drama. Many in the cast have been performing on stage since the primary years. Nor are they strangers to large productions. Last year, many of them had roles in a localised version of a farcical pantomine based on the children’s classic Cinderella, featuring characters like Prince Rupert of Bangkok and Baron Silom of Silom Hall.

“I was the wicked stepmother,” relates Pruittiporn Kerdchoochuen. “They said I was made for the part.”

Perhaps so. This year she was cast as the equally wicked Fat Sam, a gang leader and owner of the infamous speakeasy the Grand Slam. Actually, Fat Sam is the main comic character in Bugsy Malone, a perfect fit for the outgoing Pruittiporn.

“Fat Sam is basically a mafia boss, a bumbling fool,” she said of her character two days before the first performance. “He’s the main joker. His job is to make the play funny. I don’t know about others but I’ll be desperate to make it work. I’ll be desperate to make them laugh.”

On stage for much of the play, Pruittiporn had a prodigious amount of dialogue to learn. Apart from simply reading and rereading her lines, she used a novel approach to help her commit them to memory.

“I got my friends to phone up and we just put random lines to each other,” she explains. “We would be talking about something else and then we would go into the lines like ‘Tallulah, go fix your makeup.’ That’s a line from the play and Tallulah would answer back with her lines.”

Tallulah (Leelarai Weesakul) belts out a song in front of the Grand Slam’s chorus line.— RICHARD HARPER

Tallulah, played by Leelarai Weesakul, is the glamourous star attraction of the Grand Slam. Leelarai says she appreciated the chance to play such a character.

“Tallulah is very sure of herself. She knows she’s needed by Fat Sam. She knows the Grand Slam needs her. I think it's good that she’s so sure of herself. It makes me feel good about myself too.”

Having attended St John’s from year one and year three respectively, both Pruittiporn and Leelarai are fluent in English, but they still say they struggled to master the New York dialect.

That was not so much a problem for American Daniel Eleveld. His difficulties lay more in identifying with his character, the leader of the rival mobster gang. “I’m not really that kind of person,” he said of the blustering Dandy Dan whose lines included rhetorical gems like “OK, gang. This is the caper – the one that’s going to blow the lid off city hall.”

Blousey (Siree Wongrukmit) sings a jazz song at Fat Sam’s Grand Slam nightclub.— RICHARD HARPER

To prepare, Daniel says he watched gangster movies, including the original Bugsy Malone.

Like Daniel, not all of the cast were experienced performers. Apart from having a bit part in a chorus four years ago, it was Siree Wongrukmit’s first time on stage. Her role as Blousey, the Grand Slam jazz singer and Bugsy’s chief romantic interest in the play, was both challenging and enjoyable.

“I have a big part and its great,” she relates. “It’s actually the first time for me to sing jazz, but I actually like jazzy songs. I listened to the actual songs (from the movie) a lot of times. It's a little difficult to sing so high and loud, but I'll try.”

Indeed, she is doing very well, says music director Simon Holt. “Actually, she seems to have taken to it quite naturally. She’s got a nice, beautiful, pure voice. She’s pretty confident really.”

Bugsy (Chonlapat Naruenartwanich, centre) is delighted with the power of his newly–discovered fighter, Leroy (Alok Tiwari) who has just decked Avinash Sajnani who is playing one of his four different roles in the play – including that of a tree.— TERRY FREDRICKSON

Equally confident is Chonlapat Naruenartwanich who landed the plum role of Bugsy Malone himself. “I’ve done this before, but I never had a major role, so I’m getting to know what it feels like to be the major actor in such a huge production,” he says.

“You have to be a good role model for the other people to follow. You have to act really well, so other people can act as well as you.”

Schools that might be considering putting on a dramatic production on the order of Bugsy Malone should prepare for a substantial time commitment.

“You don't realise how much work is involved,” Mooney says. “When you go to a theatre, it all seems so smooth, so perfect. You don't actually realise the months of planning that’s going on behind it.”

The performers committed much of the after-school time to the play from the beginning of the term. “It started with two afternoons a week and it progressed into three as the performance date approached,” Mooney explains. “Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday we would go from about 2:45 until 5:00 pm.

“We started off working out the characters. We looked at the lines. We concentrated on where the cast is going to stand. We focused on the story and on how the characters should feel, why do they say a certain line this way – that kind of thing.”

Having a rigorous week-by-week plan is impractical, Mooney says. “It never works that way. We go through it again and again and again and it gets a little better. Eventually some costumes come into it. And then a bit of light, a bit of dancing and a bit of music – and presto! It just falls into place.”

Mooney is clearly very fortunate to have a team of specialist teachers at St John’s who are ready and willing to assist. With Bugsy Malone, for example, head of art Richard Harper supervised the students who produced the sets. Simon Holt not only worked with the musicians and the students, but he was also at the keyboard during the production.

Backstage responsibilities for Bugsy Malone fell to IGCSE drama teacher Corin James, a man who has directed quite a number of school productions himself, including last year’s Cinderella.

“A lot of what I do is controlling kids,” James relates. “In terms of moving the scenery, I've got a team of six or seven stage helpers who are very good. I’ve told them what to do and now they know what to do and they do it.

“A lot more of what I do is ensuring that the right kids in the cast are in the right place at the right time and they’re not running around causing havoc outside.”

As you might expect, performance nights are particularly hectic backstage. That is not the case for the director, however, James says.

“On the nights of the performance Tara will just sit and watch. Then it’s no longer anything to do with her and the responsibility then passes to the kids, Simon and to myself. I try to ensure that everything goes smoothly backstage and there are no major hiccups. There are always minor hiccups,” he says.

Although this was an amateur production with most of the performers in their mid-teens or below, Mooney says, standards were kept very high.

“There’s no point of putting all this work into it and then just presenting something that’s only half-hearted. If you’re going to do it properly, you’ve got to do it 100 percent.”

James agrees. “One of the things I find quite important is that people who watch it never say, ‘considering they’re only kids, that was really good’. Last year I had people coming to me and saying ‘that was really good’ with no qualification. I think that’s what Tara’s talking about – trying to do it as well as possible, putting 100 percent into it and trying to make it as polished and professional as possible.”