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Sandy Journal

Alta High Presents ‘You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown’

Dec 19, 2014 02:33PM ● By Julie Slama

The cast, pictured, and crew of “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” are advanced theater students at Alta High. The show is student-directed.

As usual, Charlie Brown is happy and hopeful when his friends say he’s a good man, but he doubts that he really is. So, Alta High senior Janie Defriez, who plays Charlie Brown, decides to find out how Charlie Brown can be a good person, taking the audience through familiar comic strip storylines, from being afraid to talk to the little red-haired girl to pitching on the baseball field, in the upcoming school production “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.”

The show opens Thursday, Jan. 15 and runs through Saturday, Jan. 17 in Alta High School’s auditorium, 11055 South 1000 East. All shows begin at 7 p.m. Tickets are $8.25 in advance and $9 at the door. The show, which is made up of Theatre IV students, is directed by senior Patrick Rideout and assistant director senior Noah Martinez.

“I selected the show because it is family friendly, fun and upbeat,” theater teacher Linze Struiksma said. “It has a small cast with simple staging and gives students the opportunity to learn how to do everything that is involved in a theater production.”

Besides Janie, the cast, which Patrick consulted with Struiksma to select, includes Kiersten Zundel as Lucy, Ryan Lambert as Linus, Charlene Wilde as Sally, Colton Orr as Schroeder, Trystyn Roberts as the voice of Snoopy and Melissa Salomonson as the Snoopy character. All the students are seniors.

“Students indicated what they were interested in doing, and then they were selected on their passion. Several students drew sketches and submitted them for costuming. The stage crew is building the set with geometrical shapes. Not every high school has a theater production class that is given this opportunity to design, direct and market their show, so this is giving our students opportunities so they will know what colleges and the real world will expect of them,” Struiksma said.

The cast began rehearsals in November during class time. In January, after-school practices will be added before the show opens.

The show was written in 1967 and was first designed just as songs after the popular comic strips, but was then created into a comical musical that premiered at an off-Broadway theater and ran for almost 1,600 shows. It later opened on Broadway, in London’s West End and toured the United States showing familiar scenes of Charlie Brown tangling his kite and Snoopy flying his doghouse against the Red Baron.

“It’s a fun show and there’s humor for everyone. The characters say cute lines about random things that the kids and adults love,” Struiksma said.