Fountain of Youth in El Dorado

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By Anne Gonzales
Photography and videography by Charr Crail

View video of the auditions

When Rick Wilson tells people the El Dorado Musical Theater recently performed the Broadway hit “42nd Street,” they nod and note it’s an ambitious show. When Wilson says the actors performed the original Broadway opening choreography with 35 people tap dancing in unison on stage, they usually utter a surprised, “What?” And when Wilson adds that the average age of the performers was 14 years old, the response is usually: “You guys are nuts.”
     As chair of the board of the El Dorado Hills-based nonprofit musical theater, Wilson realizes outsiders frequently are puzzled by the success of a theater company in a suburban foothills boomtown, like a wild rose thriving in the rocks spilling down from the Sierra Nevada. The theater’s last production, “Peter Pan,” sold approximately 11,000 tickets during its 18-show run in November 2006.
     The theater had 170 youths double cast in the production and sold out several nights at the 700-seat theater. At a ticket price of $15, this company generated nearly $150,000 in revenue for the two weeks of “Peter Pan.” And it mounts six shows a year.
     The group’s prosperity can be measured in other ways, as well. Since its founding in 2000, the company and its performers, ages 6 to 21, have garnered 96 Elly nominations, awards given by the Sacramento Area Regional Theatre Alliance for theater excellence, and won 17 Ellies. And EDMT has just become one of the first community theaters in the country to obtain the coveted rights to “High School Musical,” a stage adaptation based on the wildly popular Disney TV movie.
     Debbie Wilson, the theater’s artistic director, pauses a moment when asked how she’s able to draw super-sized talent from her pint-sized performers.

They Think They Can 
“If you don’t tell ’em they can’t, they can,” she concludes. “I push them as hard as I can, because I believe these kids are capable, way more than what people think. I just tell them to do something, and they do it.”
     The company takes as many kids as sign on to fill its cast on a first-come basis. Rick Wilson explains the primary mission of the theater is to build young people’s self-esteem through theatrical excellence. “If you’re trying to build confidence for life, you don’t start by telling them, ‘You’re not good enough to be in our play,’” he says.
     All the ingredients are evident at January’s auditions for “High School Musical,” where 97 kids sing and dance their hearts out. On the morning of audition day, lines of well-behaved, clean-cut, energetic children and teenagers with numbers on their chests wait for their spot in the limelight in front of a panel of judges and beaming parents.
     They sing alone, either a capella or with some recorded music, giving the tryouts an “American Idol” feel, without the sarcasm and humiliation. Then they dance in groups of 10 kids, performing a short routine they just learned in the adjacent mirrored dance studio. They gyrate and pulse in unison to a song, with a toe-tapping, hips-don’t-lie beat.
     “You wind up with a diverse group,” says Susan Sharp whose two daughters participate in EDMT. “You get those with a singing-and-dancing background and those who don’t usually put themselves out there, maybe the very shy kids too frightened to even raise their hand in class. They all have to perform in front of hundreds of people and at the same level.” 
     Sharp, who also coordinates corporate sponsorships and does publicity for the theater as a parent volunteer, saw her daughters blossom after acting on stage. She watched in amazement when one daughter gave her student council campaign speech without notes, smiling and poised at the microphone.
     The story of a little-community-theater-that-could is really the story of refugees from the Bay Area looking for a more satisfying life and a connection to what they recall from childhood. Debbie Wilson and her brother Rick are a sort of microcosm of El Dorado Hills’ evolving personality in the 21st century.
     Debbie moved from San Jose to El Dorado Hills six years ago. Like many a professional-turned-parent (among her choreography credits are hundreds of professional musicals and Super Bowl and Olympics extravaganzas), she had been mulling a move to a simpler lifestyle when her friend John Healy asked her to come to the Folsom area to do a show. Healy founded the children’s community theater in San Jose nearly four decades ago, leaving to become the theater teacher at Oak Ridge High School in El Dorado Hills. As she helped with the production, Debbie realized she, too, wanted to move there with her two small children.
     “I had this wild idea that we needed a community theater,” Debbie says. She and Healy co-founded EDMT.
     About three and a half years ago, Debbie called her brother, Rick. The company was struggling financially and needed help. Their production of “Music Man” in 2003 sold just 1,500 tickets. “We have a tight family, so I said I’d be there the next morning at 8 o’clock,” recalls Rick, who was a radio station promotion director in San Jose at the time. He wound up moving his family to El Dorado Hills and restructuring the business side of the theater.

Go East, Young Family
The Wilsons are just two families swept up in a jet stream of refugees from the commercial world at the turn of the millennium, a diaspora of educated overachievers from the California coast looking to create a better future for themselves. It is the latest version of the American Dream, middle-class style.
     Everyone who’s been touched by EDMT agrees that the quality productions come from a combination of high expectations, passionate adults and kids and the culturally sophisticated, professional transplants pouring into El Dorado Hills. “I don’t know if this would work anywhere else,” says Rick. “We have a little bit of magic happening in this part of the world.”
     He adds that parent involvement is a huge key to the theater’s success. Parents pay a $250 tuition fee for their kids to participate and then are required to volunteer. Because El Dorado Hills was virtually nonexistent 20 years ago and Folsom had yet to undergo its population boom, EDMT’s chair says the newcomers are taking the opportunity to shape the area’s personality. New families are also looking for a way to connect to neighbors and friends.
     “There’s something communal about the theater; it’s a community success,” Debbie says. “People here are looking for something better for their families, something they had when they were kids.” Maybe this is the real El Dorado — a fountain of youth in the foothills, where perpetually energetic people are creating a new sense of community, one play at a time. 

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