DIRECTOR’S NOTE: 

The Walnut Hill Community Theater Academy launched this fall with a yearly theme: JOURNEYS, a celebration of our world.

Over the past three months, CTA performers have explored stories and music inspired by Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe. Folktales and mythologies are coming to life in our Theater programs. Performers here are developing their voices and physicality, transporting audiences to ancient worlds that influence us even today.

Musical Theater performers have been singing and dancing across the globe to Broadway hits such as Aida, Evita, Anastasia, and An American in Paris. Each unique number allows our team to instruct performers in different aspects of voice and movement.

As a whole, the CTA is dedicated to  

• Allowing performers to embrace the world they live in by exploring shows that teach about history and culture.
• Helping every performer reach a higher skill level. 
• Development through balanced stage time. 
• Allowing performers to pursue a wide array of character types.
• Maintaining safe rehearsal and performance spaces.
• Developing creativity and critical thinking as life skills.
• Producing performers who emulate CTA’s commitment to learning and culture no matter which field they find themselves in.

We are incredibly proud of our performers, from the youngest, who learned to turn imaginative play outward, to the oldest who keep reaching for the next challenge; who reject the idea of “I can’t do it” and embrace the idea of “I will master this yet”. We cannot wait to show their talents in our WORLD SHOWCASE.

Once the curtain call is done, we will steer our ship to the next big adventure: Oceania. In January, Musical Theater will begin work on Disney’s Moana, beautifully rewritten as an ensemble show. Theater will present Shakespeare’s most magical show, The Tempest. And our friends in Theater Kids will create Maui’s Maybe Myths. And I have not forgotten about our Wayfinders, the Improvisors who continually launch themselves into the unknown, trusting they will find their way to islands of wit and merriment. 

—Todd Morse, CTA Director

A Note on Costumes:

No costume in Theater or Musical Theater is meant to accurately represent the region the story or song is coming from. Many pieces are inspired by the region or from regions surrounding it. If performers dress ‘accurately’ they will appear to be representatives of the region, and, as American youth, they are not. Performers in CTA, are branching out, learning stories and music inspired by different regions. Their final performance is a celebration of what they have learned, not an accurate representation of the region that inspired it. I draw my own inspiration from Branagh’s Hamlet, in which the costuming was described as “historically indistinct”, blending times and places into a wonderfully colorful tapestry.