Pirates have invaded Mount Rowan Secondary College this week and about 1100 local primary school pupils have been along for a swash-buckling ride.
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Unlike many secondary school productions putting on big-name production, Mount Rowan has a focus on performing smaller original works to its feeder primary schools.
A cast and crew of about 30 students, led by teacher David Allen who wrote Pirate!, have performed six shows for children, and one evening community show for an audience of around 250 people, over the past week.
Pirate! tells the story of three completely hopeless Pirate captains, one stowaway wannabe Pirate and a crew of crazy pirates, all called Jack, who are obsessed with performing circus tricks.
Mr Allen wrote the musical, along with a mix of adapted and original songs drawing on traditional Sea Shanties, children's songs and 70's disco music.
"Performing to primary schools means you've got really engaged audiences and it means we can do lots of shows so our cast and crew also really engage with the experience," Mr Allen said.
"By the end of the week the kids are running the whole thing themselves almost in a state of flow, the nerves are gone, they know where to go, what to do if something goes wrong, can improvise around other people's mistakes ... it's like a real theatre experience."
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Mr Allen said writing their own musical meant he could adapt stories and songs to highlight the skills of the cast.
"I write most of it with input from the kids, and some of it we work out along the way," he said. "We can change it to suit our kids and we deliberately had not many parts in the show so we could cover if kids got sick.
"Then we had kids audition who really deserved something so I wrote them a song and because it's our own show we can do that."
It was the first school production since 2019, with the 2020 and 2021 shows cancelled because of COVID restrictions.
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