The weekend production involves more than 150 students.
This year’s Amherst Regional High School musical is unusual because it is conventional.
“We usually do something outside the usual canon” of high school musicals, said John C. Bechtold, director of the production of “Guys and Dolls,” a comic romance set in mid-20th-century New York City. “So doing something conventional (like ‘Guys and Dolls’) for us is unconventional.”
Based on the short stories of Damon Runyon, “Guys and Dolls” features a gang of craps shooters who follow the lead of Nathan Detroit, who is simultaneously struggling to find a location for his famous roving craps game while keeping it a secret from the police and his fiancée of 14 years, Adelaide. By encouraging the well-off gambler Sky Masterson into a bet that he can’t take the local Save-a-Soul Mission leader, Sarah Brown, to dinner in Havana, the four characters initiate a run of events that test the relationships of the guys and their “dolls” until the events bring about a happy ending.
The Amherst show is “entirely home grown” with student artwork and pit performances, Bechtold said. “Our goal is to empower students to create and not just perform.”
With a cast of 90, a student pit orchestra and a student-led backstage crew, “Guys and Dolls” involves more than 160 students; that’s almost 15 percent of the student body at the grades nine through 12 school. Anita Cooper is the musical director.
“We pride ourself” on such a high percentage of participation, Bechtold said.
The point of the musical is to be inclusive and maximize the talent at the school, he continued. “We can say, ‘There’s a place for you.’”
Some of the students are new to the theater experience while others will enroll in college acting and theater programs. “It’s a heterogeneous group, and when we put them all together, it turns into something special,” the director said.
The productions, he said, show the power of the arts to bring students together, to build community in the school.
Previous productions have included “Merrily We Roll Along,” “City of Angels,” “Aida” and “A Year with Frog and Toad.”
This year, “we wanted to do something from the Golden Broadway Era because students have not been exposed to it for several years,” Bechtold said.