By Danielle Kutchel
Local stars shone brightly for an audience of global theatre talent last month, taking home an extra special award.
Capping off a year when adaptability and creativity ruled the stage and Zoom productions became the norm, junior performers from Masquerade Talent Studios won a group award for Excellence in Acting at the 2020 OzTheatrics Junior Theatre Festival Australia, which was presented as a hybrid in-person and online event on October 30 and 31 at the Civic Theatre in Newcastle, NSW.
The Junior Theatre Festival allows students and teachers representing a diverse number of theatre programs to come together to share their talents, cheer each other on, and be part of an international community of people who care as much about the art form as much as they do.
The event is part of the global Junior Theatre Festivals circuit, conceived by iTheatrics in New York, which take place in the USA, UK, Australia and New Zealand.
The Junior Theatre Festivals are the world’s largest events exclusively dedicated to celebrating young people and student-driven musical theatre.Masquerade’s 23 students, aged from 10 to 18, presented selections from Guys and Dolls JR for leading musical theatre personalities from Australia and the United States, including TONY nominee Eddie Perfect.
Studio director Carmen Powell said the award was a “credit to the kids” for their dedication to organising the Zoom routine.
Students would attend weekly classes to learn their moves, then record their routine and audio at home to be sewn together with their peers for entry to the festival.
Judges complimented students on their accents in particular.
Sisters Maggie and Emily Adcock were excited to be part of the production – Maggie’s third and Emily’s first – and experience the challenge of acting over Zoom.
“It was a whole new bunch of learning opportunities,” Maggie explained, “And it was cool to keep up that tradition of going to the festival even though we couldn’t be there in person, because it’s still just as amazing doing it in a different way.
“It’s difficult when you do a show online because you don’t have that human interaction and hype that you can feel directly from other people like you can in the studio … but after I saw our performance, it was a real feeling of pride and celebration of what we had created,” she said.
