Central Ohio high school theater students take on new challenges with staging, technology

As central Ohio high schools launch their 2019-20 theater seasons, some fall shows will venture a technical step or two further by design.

While Big Walnut High School students in Sunbury work to beef up key puppet-costumes for its fall musical, Pickerington North High School will tackle a multicultural musical fable with its first arena staging.

Columbus School for Girls in Bexley, meanwhile, will bring a lesser-known chapter of women’s history to life with a new projection system for a multimedia play.

Big Walnut: ‘Little Shop of Horrors’

Big Walnut will start its theater season with a perfect Halloween production: “Little Shop of Horrors,” featuring a series of student-designed puppets for Audrey II, the talking, man-eating alien plant from this musical update of “Faust.”

More than 20 students have been involved in the design, creation and operation of four progressively bigger puppets for Audrey

II. The school, which staged the musical in 2002, already owned two of the four puppets needed to animate the plant, but drama director Layne Bair asked design students to create something less cartoonish as they adapted the existing puppets and created new ones at a total cost of $700.

“The kids’ assignment was to make it scarier,” she said.

After a design competition in her drama class, Bair combined the best elements for the new Audrey II, voiced by Noah Fitch.

Senior Allison Dible focused on