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Altamont Premieres Single Rider Musical

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A collage of images from the perfomance of Single Rider
Altamont Premieres Single Rider Musical
After three years of building The Altamont School’s Theatre Program into a best-in-show winner featuring popular musicals, Director Reid Watson led his students in a challenging new direction this year. The program remains devoted to musical theatre, but Altamont presented the high school premiere of an unpublished work for its fall production Nov. 15-17. "Single Rider," by Amanda D’Archangelis (music and book) and Sami Horneff (lyrics and book), earned top honors at the district Walter Trumbauer High School Theatre Festival Nov. 2, including Best in Show, Best Ensemble, Best Performance by a Leading Role (Lottie Kanter), Best Performance of the Day by a Supporting Role (Kennadi Sullen) and All Star Casting (Valeria Blanco-Barajas and Ali LeJeune).
 
The light comedy mixes traditional Amish music with pop and rock as it follows three young Amish women at Lucky Land amusement park on the first day of their Rumspringa, the traditional year in which Amish youth explore the “English” world. All three are transformed, but one faces an especially wrenching choice—to return to the world she knows or answer the call of her heart.
 
Looking back on Altamont’s recent audience favorites, Watson acknowledges the risk of committing to a work so new that early rehearsals were essentially workshops for the musical, with additions, rewrites and notes from the authors shaping the production on the fly. Musical theatre is a challenging art, and presenting an unfamiliar work is daunting for all involved.
 
Actors, especially, bear a heavier creative burden when developing a new production. “They can’t get online and watch a YouTube clip of how somebody else played this role because there is no reference for them,” Watson said. “So, they have to really use their imaginations and create something fresh.” As a technical challenge, he observed that the actors’ diction was especially important for audiences who can’t fill in the details of pop hits as in recent productions of "Mama Mia! and "A Chorus Line." Students in Altamont’s new Technical Theatre class stepped up, too, developing the in-demand professional skills required to manage costumes for 17 "Single Rider" characters and creating an amusement park onstage at the school’s Cabaniss-Kaul Center for the Arts. The show also featured live accompaniment by Altamont student musicians.
 
Watson says someone must take up these challenges for theatre to grow. “Supporting new work is so important, because that’s how we get the greats like "Hamilton" or the older shows from Rogers and Hammerstein,” he said. “Even though this is a new work, audiences might really fall in love with it.” He is already on board, having first encountered "Single Rider" as a Master of Fine Arts student at the University of Alabama, where he served as Assistant Director for a semester-long study and staged reading of the musical. By that time, it had evolved from a 10-Minute Musical at the 2017 BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop, into a full-length 2018 Off-Broadway musical at The Player’s Theatre. “It was fantastic,” Watson says of the still-developing work. “I just fell in love with the music, and the story is so relatable for students. It stayed with me”.
 
Watson was pleased to share "Single Rider" as the world high school premiere and the premiere of the work as it has developed since 2018. He is also proud that Altamont’s students trusted him to lead them into something unfamiliar. “I sort of knew that we had enough of a program that they will go on this journey with me,” he said. “That might not have been the case after I’d only been here a year or two. They just love theatre, and they love being together."