It’s a dark and stormy night when a group of high school students on a field trip stumble upon the House of Usher after their bus breaks down, forcing them to spend the night among ghosts and their own interpersonal drama.
This premise for Theatre of Arts Discipline (TOAD)’s kids summer production at the Evergreen Playhouse in Centralia evokes more drama than comedy, but “Usher: A Totally Teen Comedy” does both, balancing laughs and a happy ending with teen drama, weighty issues and plenty of spooks.
“It is loosely based on the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Usher being,
of course, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’” said show director and TOAD co-owner Rich Garrett. “... It’s an interesting kind of mashup of all of Poe’s tales, in a modernized version.”
The cast features 18 youth between the ages of 8 and 18 who are enrolled in TOAD’s summer camp at the Evergreen Playhouse, where they had four weeks to put the show together.
“These kids have this show memorized, and they’ve been ready to go for a week already,” Garrett said.
TOAD is a youth-based theater organization founded by Rich and Kris Garrett in Nevada in 2009. The couple ran the program in Nevada for about seven years before they moved up to the Pacific Northwest and brought TOAD with them.
“I’ve made so many friends with the cast. It’s just a really good experience,” said Melissa Baine, who is participating in TOAD for her fourth year this summer.
“There’s so much that keeps me coming back,” said Justin Hazlett, who is also a returning participant to the TOAD summer program in Centralia.
In addition to summer camps at the Evergreen Playhouse in Centralia and Charles Wright Academy in Tacoma, TOAD operates outreach programs to elementary, middle and high schools across the region.
“The first thing to go in these schools, when cuts are made, are the arts,” Rich Garrett said, adding that TOAD acts as an after-school program for schools without their own theater programs.
“What we do is we bring the director, the choreographer, the music director, the lights, the costumes, the set, and we cast their kids in it,” Rich Garrett said.
“Usher: A Totally Teen Comedy” opens at the Evergreen Playhouse in Centralia on Friday, Aug. 2, and runs through Sunday, Aug. 4. Performances are 7 p.m. on Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. on Sunday.
Tickets, which are $15 for adults and $10 for students and seniors, can be purchased online by emailing crummettbrenda@gmail.com or at the door ahead of a performance.
After this show closes on Sunday, TOAD will begin its second summer camp in Centralia — “Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief: Theatre for Young Audiences Edition.”
That camp runs Aug. 5-25 at the Evergreen Playhouse, with performances Aug. 23-25.
After eight years of doing summer camp productions at the Evergreen Playhouse, Rich and Kris Garrett have announced that this year’s two camps will be its last in this space.
“We’ll still be going on up in Tacoma and everything, but the commute when we live in University Place is an hour each way … We had to make the decision for this to be our last year, and we’ll go out with a bang,” Rich Garrett said. “... When we told the kids, they were disappointed, of course. Some of the kids that have been in the program for quite some time were like, ‘Oh, we’ll follow you to Tacoma.’”
All of TOAD’s summer theater camps are open to the public. For more information, visit TOAD’s website at https://www.toadtheatre.com/ or Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/TOADLLC.
The Evergreen Playhouse is located at 226 W. Center St. in Centralia.
‘Usher: A Totally Teen Comedy’ cast list
William: Cael Best
Wilson: Kiran Bhatia
Monty: Melissa Baine
Fortunato: Matt Leggett
Valdemar: Lilly Wickert
Raven: Susannah Berry
Annabel Lee: Sierra Moran
Eleonora: Finley Stidham
Dupin: Summer Moran
Sonia: Elsie Leggett
Pym: Leah Clark
Edgar: Ryker Jensen
Roderick Usher: Wyatt Nichols
Madeline Usher: Mia Waite
Eulalie: Temperance Olson
Mann: Stephen Shankle
Tarr/Fether: Justin Hazlett
Tamerlane: Tess McMurry
The Red Death: various actors
