Jose Gonzalez, left, and Mathew Balicki practice tossing “water” on the Wicked Witch of the West, Jessica Duran. The production is the brainchild of Marana High School teachers Sarah Ross and Heidi Barker.
Next weekend, the year-old Marana Community Music Theater troupe is putting on its first music theater production, a concert version of “The Wizard of Oz.”
Nearly 70 cast members, when you include the full orchestra, have spent weeks this summer getting ready for a one-night-only performance on Friday, July 27.
For the past six weeks, they have filled one of the conference rooms of the Marana Senior Center next to Ora Mae Harn Park two nights a week. For several hours on those nights, they follow the direction of MCMT founders Sarah Ross and Heidi Barker to prepare for that performance.
But this is about more than a night at the theater.
In a town best known for its cotton fields and farmlands, strip malls and look-alike subdivisions, artistic expression in all its forms, from visual to performing, is becoming a town priority.
“If this is something that brings pleasure and gets people involved because you’re going to have young and old and every ethnic group and every neighborhood involved, we invest in our people,” said Mayor Ed Honea.
The town places artwork by high school students and area artists in its parks. One of the most ambitious recently was steel statues of a deer family designed by Tucson artist Trevor O’Toole and crafted by welding students from Marana High School that was installed on Tangerine Road as a centerpiece of the upcoming Tangerine Sky Park. It also hosts school choirs for performances at town events, from Founders Day to the Fourth of July.
But the venture with MCMT is a true partnership, one that started with two teachers asking, “What if?”
Musical director Sarah Ross, right, retreats to give Lullaby League’s Maya Peden, left, and Sevin Williams room to dance. Friday’s performance will be at Marana High School.
Creating art for arts sake
When you drive past Marana on Interstate 10, you see a smattering of strip malls and cookie-cutter subdivisions. At the older end of town past Avra Valley Road off Interstate 10, there are farmlands and the town’s rodeo rink around the corner from Marana Middle School off West Grier Road.
A towering sign peeks over the highway walls separating the town from the busy interstate at Marana Road, the main thoroughfare to what amounts to Marana’s downtown. It’s home to the town’s business offices, City Hall and the police department, which is across the street from the central town park, named after beloved former Mayor Ora Mae Harn.
Harn’s name is also on the senior center where more than two dozen “Oz” cast members were rehearsing on a recent Wednesday. They rehearse a couple nights a week, two to three hours each night. They are on a tight timetable. Auditions were held in mid-June, which gave them about five weeks to pull this all together.
Ross and Barker lead rehearsals. Ross, who just finished her 10th year as Marana High School’s choir director, works on the music end while Barker, who has spent six years as Marana High’s theater director, gives everyone their acting cues.
MCMT is their baby. They conceived of it three years ago as a way to keep their graduates involved in the arts. The idea was to do community concerts and music theater productions in Marana with Marana residents, not just their students.
“I wanted my alumni to have something to do, and I wanted their parents to have something to do,” said Ross, 33.
Munchkin Mayor Jordan Rivero, wearing hat, and Munchkin Barrister Mathew Balicki huddle together as they await the Wicked Witch of the West during a rehearsal of Marana Community Music Theater’s production of “The Wizard of Oz.”
But the pair, who had inserted themselves and their students into the community over the years at every turn including the annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony and Cotton Festival, ran into a bit of a snag. They had no space in which to rehearse or perform, and no means to pay the high cost of renting space.
So they put their plans on hold — until they got a call last summer from a town parks official who had an interesting proposition: The Parks Department wanted to create a performing arts program. Could Ross and Barker help?
“Funny you should ask,” Barker, 31, recalled thinking.
Town officials were big fans of Ross and Barker after seeing them in action two years ago at the All American City competition in Denver, Colorado. The mayor and several town officials were with Ross, Barker and a couple dozen Marana High choir students who were tapped by the town to perform for the competition.
“It’s amazing. They would tell their kids to do something and either Sarah would start singing with the chorus or Heidi would start acting and sometimes you would think they were the kids,” Honea said. “The kids absolutely loved them.”
The town didn’t win the competition; Honea said it was because they didn’t have “a big enough problem to fix.” But the competition and those few days with those kids, including watching them bust out in song while riding a city bus in Denver, ignited in Honea and other town officials a desire to nurture the arts on a bigger scale.
“Years ago, my thing was we need three things in Marana: police, parks and roads, and that’s where we spent all the money,” Honea said. “Still do now, but Marana is getting to be a big enough place” — the population was near 47,000 as of 2016 — “that we can start doing things like arts.”
Jose Gonzalez, left, and Mathew Balicki, practice tossing “water” on the Wicked Witch of the West, Jessica Duran. The group’s first musical performance is Friday, July 27.
Exceeding expectations
MCMT announced itself through social media last September, and Sarah Ross thought optimistically that maybe 20 people would turn out.
“I think we ended up with 45 people,” she said. “We were just really, really happy with it.”
Their first performance was at the town’s annual Cotton Festival, which in the fall will be held as the Farm Festival. It’s held at the town’s new Heritage River Park off Tangerine Road, not far from the new Gladden Farms Elementary School, abutting several new housing developments with one- and two-story homes.
Heritage Park is where old and new Marana come together; near where the MCMT choir performed is a big barn, horses and cows and a cotton field that rings the park.
That performance was a test run of sorts to gauge interest from the participants and the community, which turns out in big numbers for community-wide events like the Cotton Festival.
A hundred or more packed the little courtyard for the performance, which featured a mixed choir of adults and kids. The crowd was probably double that size in early June, when the choir performed a concert of works inspired by Shakespeare in the auditorium of Gladden Farms Elementary.
The June concert was the first event of MCMT’s first full season. The plan is to do a choir concert in late spring, a musical theater piece in late summer and a Shakespeare in the park event in the fall.
When they announced auditions for “Wizard of Oz” days after that early June concert, Ross again anticipated 20 or so people would show up.
Forty-five people auditioned for the roles of Dorothy, the Wizard, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, Munchkins, trees and ensemble parts. In all, the cast includes 48 actors/singers, an orchestra of 16 and a stage crew of 10.
“I think the biggest surprise is how many people want to be involved,” said Barker, who grew up in Continental Ranch, graduated from Mountain View High School and never ventured beyond Twin Peaks Road until she landed the job at Marana High six years ago. “I feel like I didn’t even know Marana. I would always go toward Tucson.”
The mission statement of MCMT is to provide artistic opportunities for Marana and its residents so that they won’t have to turn to Tucson.
“There is all this weirdly amazing talent out there and they shouldn’t have to drive into Tucson,” Ross said. “We wanted to bring it to them. It’s one of our main values as a music theater company is that we are in Marana, for Marana and by Marana.”
Picture Rocks resident Heather Morse auditioned for a role in the ensemble with her 19-year-old son, Ian, who was active in choir and theater at Marana High for three years before graduating in May. She and Ian are both in the production.
Morse has lived in Marana since 1995 and says she always considered the town as a warm and friendly place to raise kids and live quietly. She and her neighbors use the phrase “going into town” when they need to go shopping at the stores off Interstate 10 and Cortaro Road, and no one really considered Marana a hotbed for any sort of entertainment beyond their kids’ school plays and church events.
But when Ian got involved in choir and theater his sophomore year in high school, Morse got an eye-opener on the talent hidden in plain sight.
“When I went and saw how amazing last year’s ‘Les Misérables’ was, I was like. ‘Oh my gosh, this is really, really, really good’,” Morse said, then gushed about the choir’s performance last year of Vivaldi’s masterwork “Gloria” and Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms,” which was part of the Tucson Desert Song Festival. “People are always stunned when I tell them that’s high school. Yeah, that’s high school. I think what it is is I never expected it and I am so grateful that (the town of) Marana has taken ahold of it and really respects them.”
Twin sisters Delaney and Devin Harkins — one of two sets of twins in “Oz” — will play Munchkin twins in the performance. Delaney said she and her sister have been performing since sixth grade.
“Any chance I can get to perform on stage to sing and act, I take,” the 15-year-old said.
But her performing until now has only been with kids her age.
“You see people getting off of work and people coming with their parents,” she said. “It gives everybody a chance from all age groups. It doesn’t matter how old you are or how young you are. I like making music and I like doing it with these people.”
Greylyn Zurita, right, watches musical director Sarah Ross as the cast works through a number for the upcoming performance. Ross say she was “really, really happy” when 45 people, double her expectations, showed up to start the Marana Community Music Theatre.
Crunch time
At last week’s rehearsal, the Harkins twins locked arms as they danced about, celebrating the witch’s demise. The scene followed the declaration by the Mayor of Munchkin (Jordan Rivero, whose twin, Gabe, is also in the performance) and the Barrister of Munchkin (Mat Balicki). Balicki’s scene prompted laugher among the ensemble cast sitting in rows of chairs behind them in the modest Marana Senior Center conference room.
After an initial run-through, Ross cued to the crew members running the recorded soundtrack to back it up a few bars while Barker gave the sisters a few ideas on how to exaggerate their movements so that the audience understood the impact of the scene.
“Don’t worry. We’ll have the orchestra and the timing will be much better,” Ross noted as they started the scene again.
For an hour or more, they went over key scenes several times. At one point, Rivero forgot a couple words, and Ross couldn’t help but smile.
Balicki, who effected a high-pitched nasal tone for the scene, had a smile painted from ear to ear throughout the rehearsals.
For him, MCMT is a stepping stone in a series of stepping stones that started when he took theater and choir at Marana High; he graduated three years ago and is hoping to make a life in theater.
Balicki, 21, grew up in Picture Rocks surrounded by the farmlands and cattle grazing in the fields that have historically defined Marana. When his girlfriend suggested they audition for “Wizard of Oz” and he got involved in MCMT, he started seeing another side to Marana — a side that Ross and Barker and Honea have known for some time.
“I always tell people the best thing about Marana High is its arts program,” Balicki said. “Marana is full of incredibly talented people. It’s much more than a farm town.”