Winter Drama Programs - Now Enrolling

Oddfellows Playhouse Youth Theater is pleased to announce that its Winter 2013 Session will begin the week of January 28.  Oddfellows’ programs use theater as a vehicle to build essential life skills, while exploring highly educational and artistic themes and plays.  There are a variety of performance options and technique based classes for students ages 3-18.

Classes for the Little Fellows (ages 3-4) include Around the World and Animal Adventures. Classes are offered on Saturday mornings.  Looking for something to do during the week with your little one?  Participatory classes include Parents & Tots and Arts Explosion on Thursday mornings at 10am. 

First Act (Grades K-1) offers Creative Drama courses themed around children’s books and adventures such as Fractured Fairytales and Jungle Safari.  Story Starters (Grades 2-3) encourage creative expression and promote confidence, self-esteem, and communication.  Once a week classes focus on skill building, while classes that meet twice a week short productions put those skills into action.  Classes include Peter and the Wolf and Create Your Own Story and a mini-production of Grimm Fairytales.  The Kids Company (Grades 4-5) is the stage that students begin to focus more on skills and techniques.  These courses help develop the next set of vocal, physical and emotional skills.  Technique classes include Fundamentals of Acting, Create a Character and Fundamentals of Musical Theater. An original comedic mini-production is also on tap, called More Rubber Chickens.

The Junior Repertory Company (grades 6-8) offers a full production of Alice Threw the Looking Glass, a parody of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style by John Walch.  In this comedy, First-year college student Alice is in serious danger of failing her English course when she follows her composition paper into the trash -- and ends up in a hallucinatory world where the rules of grammar are turned upside-down. If she wants to pass, she'll need to deal with gunslinging run-on sentences, thugs hawking colloquialisms, fearsome Modifier Leeches, and more. 

The Teen Repertory Company (grades 9-12) will be holding auditions on Tuesday January 29 from 7-9pm.

There are also private lessons, stagecraft, directing and playwrighting classes available for middle and high school students.  A full list of program offerings and public performances can be found online at www.oddfellows.org.

Oddfellows programming is made possible through the generous support of the CDBG Scholarship Program, Citizens Bank, the CT Department of Economic and Community Development, the CT Department of Education, Daphne Seybolt Culpeper Memorial Fund, Elizabeth Carse Foundation, the Fund for Greater Hartford, the George A. and Grace L. Long Foundation, the Irving Kohn Foundation, the J. Walton Bissell Foundation, Liberty Bank Foundation, Maximilian E. & Marion O. Hoffman Foundation, Middlesex County Community Foundation, Middlesex United Way, the Middletown Commission on the Arts, Middletown YSB, the National Endowment for the Arts, Pratt & Whitney, Price Chopper Golub Foundation, the Stare Fund, Stop and Shop Foundation, Thomas J. Atkins Foundation, Triple Frog, LLC and WESU (88.1FM).