Franklin Apple Students Get A Taste Of Showbiz

Without the cake, you’ll never fly. Harsh news for two pigs who long to fly and, who with their duck pal,- go off (at night!) to find the secret magical flower that blooms only after the sun goes down. With that flower, they can make the cake.

And with huge doses of imagination and the energy of 74 school children, the APPLE program at Franklin Elementary is pulling off an original musical play that premiers tonight. It’s called, “The Pigs Who Believed in Cake.”

APPLE, an alternative-learning program known for its parental participation, is depending on kid participation for this play. Every student in APPLE’s first- through sixth-grade program has a part in the play, written by Anthony Flinn, an English professor at Eastern Washington University. Flinn is married to Tama Dalton, the APPLE teacher for fifth and sixth grades.

The two came up with the idea for the play because they wanted to involve all the students in the production, and only an original play could do that.

Flinn based the play on stories he had told his two boys at bedtime.

“They were more attentive when I made them up,” he explained. He built on that idea for “Pigs.”

“I wanted to enchant the kids in the play and have them discover who they were by acts of the imagination,” he said.

There’s plenty of imagination to go around in this show. Poor Bud, Spud, and Ted are labeled silly and useless, newly fired from their jobs and are taunted by the villagers who sing, “It’s only their imaginations and they’ve been dreaming for too long.”

So it’s off to Snakebite Pond and the dark forest for Jeremy Koziol, Melanie Piperek and Rachel Ballien, the actors who play the pigs and duck. A gang of cats taunts and tricks the trio, and the fun continues from there.

For the songs, Flinn collaborated with Brad Pearson, who writes marching band arrangements for a living and is an APPLE parent. Pearson was inspired by Flinn’s lyrics and wrote music for seven original songs, plus reprises and incidental music.

All three of the APPLE teachers have incorporated the play into their lessons. Beth Calkins, who teaches first and second grades, read the play to her students, then taught insects in detail, which helped the children when they made mosquito costumes.

Chris Corigliano, the third/fourth-grade teacher, and Dalton then acted out the play with props and costumes so the youngest students would appreciate the play more.

Corigliano’s students planted trees, studied and sketched trees, then teamed up to decide the dark forest’s three-panel backdrop. Those drawings and discussions also produced the papier-mache mushrooms.

“The kids invest in it on all kinds of levels,” Dalton said. “They made it theirs.”

That’s evident in watching bell ringers, mosquitoes, cats, scrubbers, and 20 scary noises all rehearse, along with two over-size elves who take Visa and MasterCard.

Those scary noises are thwarted when Bud, Spud, and Ted imagine that they are flowers. The noises reverse their dark capes to reveal brightly tie-dyed capes, which the third- and fourth-grade students designed and colored themselves.

During rehearsals, a beaver makes a suggestion, a slight change. Dalton nods in agreement.

“That stuff from your head works better,” she said. “If you see it up there, we’ll see it out here.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: DRAMA TIME “The Pigs Who Believed in Cake,” is an original children’s musical presented by Franklin Elementary’s APPLE program. Performances are tonight and Friday at 7:30 p.m. in the school gym, 2627 E. 17th. Admission is a can of food for the Spokane Food Bank.