Coal City High School theater department Director Jack Micetich was busy preparing his students for their performance of “Alice By Heart” at the Illinois High School Theatre Festival when he learned that his program was one of 29 across the country selected to premiere “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” for its fall production.
The school was selected as part of Broadway Licensing Global’s “Wands at the Ready” contest, a contest that asked schools to describe why their school or community is the most magical place to produce the play in a video posted to their social media platforms.
“For us, we’d been going back and forth,” Micetich said. “There’s the very obvious way we’re special in that we have a supportive district and the amenities and facilities to do what we do, and it’s pretty magical to have a supportive administrative. That is not common. Ultimately, what sets our program apart is what we just saw.”
Micetich, in this case, was talking about senior Jared Counterman, who stars as George Banks in their upcoming production of “Mary Poppins,” who had to leave to make it to track practice on time.
“Jared is running track, Elsa [Bunton] is running to tennis and Stephen [Byers] is running to football, and Elaina [Patten] is our theater girl, but she’s still running to cosmo every day,” Micetich said. “There’s so many kids running so many different directions, so our video focused on the fact that this is what sets us apart and makes us magical.
“We have football players, basketball players, trades kids and everyone else pitching in. We have welders who can put our pieces together who contribute on and off the stage.”
The program has upward of 95 students involved for its spring musical at a school of 600 students. Almost one-sixth of Coal City High School students are involved in the theater program.
“If you make a list of all the things our kids are doing outside of that, it’s pretty incredible,” Micetich said. “So we did a video that had all of them dressed in their different stuff. Elaina was in her apron, Elsa was in her tennis stuff, and we had [Byers] narrate the video.
“We had wrestlers in their singlets, football players and color guard students in their uniforms. Then, we had them use the sorting hat. We just sorted all [of] them from all the different realms into the theater department.”
Micetich said a play such as “Cursed Child” rarely becomes available this quickly. It typically gets announced that it will become available but it’ll be years before it’s available to license, so he knew he had to jump on it when the opportunity came.
“It’s been a weird, crazy process,” Micetich said. “I don’t really think it’s sunk in even right now because when I found out, we were at state for ‘Alice by Heart,’ so we’d brought the whole show to Bloomington. We’re opening the next morning, and I get the email that we’ve been granted the rights, and then we jumped right into ‘Mary Poppins.’
“We really haven’t had a lot of time to process it, but everywhere I go, that’s the first thing people want to talk about.”
Byers, Bunton, Patten and Counterman all are seniors starring in their final high school play with “Mary Poppins,” so they won’t get to participate in “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” when it premieres in the fall, but they still played an essential role in getting the Coal City theater department the rights to run the show.
Byers recalled the process and how it came together.
“It came together really quickly,” Byers said. “The deadline was in, like, two or three days, and then [Micetich] was working on editing the rest of the time.”
Bunton said she received a text to bring her tennis stuff to theater practice without too much of an idea about what was going on.
Although there’s plenty of excitement around the premiere of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” the Coal City theater department is focused on its upcoming performance of “Mary Poppins,” which runs at 7 p.m. March 8, 9, 15 and 16, as well as at 2 p.m. March 10 and 17.
Tickets can be bought at www.showtix4u.com/events/CCTheatreDept.
To see the video the theater department put together, visit https://fb.watch/qxRwneMgHw.
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