The time is the mid-seventies, and we get transported there through the use of the distinctive music of the times. It opens in a school auditorium where the young, supportive, hippy teacher Miss Edmunds (played to uncanny perfection by Kaitlyn Nicole Terrill) is leading her music class in the vibrant Up, Up and Away and then egging them on into singing The Carpenters’ Sing, which the students are reluctant to embrace at first but eventually get into it. Completing the time travel back three decades are some great selections that play during scene changes, and that the audience really got into.

We are soon introduced to the main character of the story, a lonely and somewhat shy fifth grader named Jesse Aarons (Michael Sanchez) who loves to draw. He also likes to race. He is not so interested in meeting new neighbors. Enter Leslie Burke (Christine Hillmann), a tomboy from a poor family who dresses funny and acts unlike any girl he’s ever met before. Despite losing to her in a race at school, they soon realize they are soulmates who share the most important values. Together, at the encouragement of Leslie, they find a secret place in the woods and create a magical kingdom called Terabithia – a place they would rule as king and queen and that only they would know about, and that you could only get to by swinging across a small creek with an enchanted rope tied to a tree branch.

Michael Sanchez gives a terrific performance as the outsider who reluctantly and then gratefully befriends a fellow outsider, and then somehow finds a way to deal the sudden loss of that person. He is also an accomplished pianist, and regales us with a little Elton John’s Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me. Christine Hillmann seems to become Leslie Burke, the awkward but easy-to-love tomboy who embraces friendship, life, and its many possibilities so fully. Making her final scene all the more heart wrenching.

A few other standouts include Jesse’s amusingly obnoxious and self-involved older sisters (Allyson Lawton and Erin Wuthrich), his hilariously bratty but adorable younger sister (Heather Banks), and Nikki Mendivil as enemy-turned-friend Janice Avery. Conor Tibbs and Samantha Trent turn in a beautiful rendition of The Rose. And David Sensenbaugh and Karina Gillette give an all-too-real performance of grieving parents meeting their child’s best friend.

Performs through June 4, 2006.

Rob Hopper
National Youth Theatre

Jesse Aarons –