In a future Haines bowling alley, a group of toys stuck in an out-of-order claw machine sing, dance and philosophize their way through an uncertain future in a 45-minute romp debuting in Haines this week.
The 25-person cast rehearsed lines, songs, and dance moves this month as part of the annual Summer Youth Theater camp, put on by the Lynn Canal Community Players.
Director Annette Hillman, who has taught at the conservatory for four years, said she chose to put on “The Claw” this year based on feedback from the kids after last year’s production.
“They didn’t want to do another fairy tale,” she said. “They wanted to do something with no love stories and an avoidance of step-parents and step-siblings.”
She began searching through what was available for the age range taught at the camp: 8 to 16-year-olds. As she sifted through plays and musicals, the music from “The Claw” stuck out.
“It’s easy for kids to learn. It’s in great keys,” she said. “There’s different genres of songs: one’s like an old-fashioned swing, jazzy songs. We’ve got songs that are kind of satires on other songs that are going to be pretty recognizable and they’re really funny lyrics.”
With so many moving parts to this year’s production, Hillman, assistant director Klover Cinnoco and musical director Cathy Pashigian of Juneau often split the kids into groups to work on music, dialogue and running scenes.
New this year is a set designed, at least partially, using artificial intelligence.
Hillman said she can’t draw, but she knew what she wanted — so she used AI to design it. Then scenic designer Maggie Balise and set builder John Norton brought it to life.
The camp doesn’t like to purchase a lot of new materials, so the group made do with what they had on-hand.
“The biggest issue was the claw machine itself,” Hillman said. “We have two ramps and one is for the claw to go down, the other is for toys to be ejected out of the scene.”
Her first idea was for a slide, but that became too logistically complex to find and work around on stage.
“We came up with the idea of a ramp that’s like a slide. Well, the first ramp that we built — John [Norton] asked how tall I wanted it to be. Me, not thinking ‘Oh maybe I should hold up two boards together and figure out a hypotenuse’ said ‘oh, you know, four feet tall.’”
The result was an incredibly steep ramp.
“I couldn’t walk up and the kids would go down like 80 miles an hour,” Hillman said, laughing at the memory.
They brought the ramp down a foot – problem solved. The rest of the set was built in about four hours, she said.
“I don’t know how he does what he does,” she said of Norton’s set-building skill. “It’s the same thing with [costume designer] Becky Nash. Everything is either donated, or recycled or reworked. Becky is a wizard. All the grownups that helped me were just wizards.”
The Claw runs 7 p.m. July 25-26. Tickets are $12 for adults, $7 for children, and $35 for the whole family, and are on sale at the Bookstore and at the door at the Chilkat Center for cash or check only.