Youth on stage

March 27, 2010
Nelson Youth Theatre is celebrating its 10th anniversary in the ambitious style that is the hallmark of its founder. Geoff Collett reports.
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There is an unavoidable sense of the driven about Richard Carruthers and his role at the helm of Nelson Youth Theatre.
How else to explain the company's extraordinary output of productions over the past 10 years? Or the increasingly ambitious goals Mr Carruthers is setting for it? The commitment and risk he is prepared to carry on its behalf? And the time and energy he has devoted to it during that decade?
He is, he admits, "hyperactive". Plus, "a few people have commented over the years about my ability - or maybe drawback - to push people beyond the boundaries of where they feel comfortable. Which can be scary or painful, but I think at the end of it, you grow immensely if you're forced to step beyond that comfort zone and do something more than what you were anticipating with a role".
That readiness to occupy the discomfort zone led to his own immersion in Nelson's amateur theatre scene, which became a commitment far beyond what might normally be expected of a dad who got into drama because he was looking for a hobby he could enjoy with his young children.
He quickly fell for it, but also quickly discovered that it wasn't as child- friendly as he had hoped.
"I found that whenever I went to auditions with the kids, I would get cast, being an adult, and they would be in the chorus or not get a callback. I thought that was an incredibly selfish hobby for me, because I was the one having all the fun while they were standing around being the cannon fodder."
The answer, he decided, lay in his conviction that despite being a newcomer to the scene, his professional experience and personality type suited producing and directing plays of his own. Then he could start making things happen for budding actors. Nelson Youth Theatre was born, if in humble circumstances.
Early productions, he freely concedes today, were a bit rough, reflecting the inexperience at play, but also hinted at bold ambitions.
The shows may not have been "anything like as polished as what we can put on now", but the packaging - including early "multiplex" shows, where a series of plays was staged at a single venue at the same time - demonstrated that he was determined to both maximise the involvement of the youngsters and push the boundaries of what was possible.
It was, he says, "a very fast learning curve".
"It's very stressful when you don't know what you're doing, so I was incredibly stressed in my first few years."
It didn't exactly deter him. The idea of a youth company struck a chord with others - including, crucially, Nelson Intermediate School, where teacher and youth theatre supporter Jim Wiseman convinced the hierarchy to lend its facilities to the fledgling group. For almost all of its 10 years, the company has been able to call the school home, using its hall, its classrooms, its sewing classroom, its storage facilities, even many of its pupils to help it grow and evolve.
"Their gift to us has been enormous, " Mr Carruthers says.
Meanwhile, the company has continued to pursue ever-loftier goals.
Throughout its life, Nelson Youth Theatre has put on plenty of small, humble shows, primarily designed to help test and develop the talents of its members; but, especially in the past few years, it has embraced ever more ambitious undertakings.
The biggest so far was 2007's production of Les Miserables. If anything proves the seriousness with which Mr Carruthers has pursued his vision, it would have to be the near- $100,000 budget that lay behind that youthful execution of one of the most loved of epic musicals.
The company relies almost entirely on audiences paying for the cost of staging such big productions. and Mr Carruthers carries the ultimate liability if something falls badly flat. "No risk, no gain, " he says, before adding wryly, "I guess I'll change my philosophy one day when we lose 40 grand".
It is worth noting that his Nelson osteopathy practice has become the de facto administrative base for the company; a notice on one of the clinic's internal doors advises it to be the office of Nelson Youth Theatre, and the practice secretary is also the theatre company's production manager, handling all its paperwork.
His commitment has even spilled, in a way, overseas. On a family trip to Africa a few years ago, he came across a young man running a modest scheme to offer simple artistic opportunities to Kenyan slum children who had been locked up by the police.
Back in Nelson, Mr Carruthers convinced Nelson Youth Theatre to help raise money through its productions - up to $600 a month - which now funds a much-enhanced project teaching the otherwise hopeless young slum dwellers creative performance skills.
The challenges, meanwhile, keep mounting. Given that Nelson Youth Theatre has a landmark birthday to celebrate, 2010 is shaping up as its biggest year. It has a staggering 85 individual productions from its first nine years (all of them produced by Mr Carruthers, and two-thirds of them under his direction). By the end of next week, that will be up to 87 as it opens its double bill anniversary show - two musicals, a Stephen Sondheim fairytale mash-up called Into the Woods and the perennially popular Oliver!.
The dust will hardly have settled on that before the company will be into its next project, a one-act festival of 10 individual plays scheduled for May, to push the total number of shows staged to 97.
In October comes the biggest undertaking yet, a triple-bill lineup of musicals, each staged daily one after the other over a 10-day season, with 30 performances in all - Little Princess, Godspell and My Fair Lady - and so notching up 100 shows in 10 years.
If it sounds absurd in its scope, Mr Carruthers is unfazed.
"I wouldn't be launching into it if I didn't think we could do it, " he says, arguing that such a landmark needs to be marked in a way that involves the maximum number of participants.
Then again, he reflects only half- joking, "I'm not sure that [doing three musicals at once] has ever been done anywhere. Who else would be stupid enough to do three musicals at once with one company?".
All of this poses the question: why? He offers a couple of explanations.
A personal one goes back to his own childhood, when he was a rising star as a schoolboy cricketer in his native England - he won a contest to find the country's fastest schoolboy bowler - but never had the sort of follow-up mentoring and coaching that could have seen him develop into a professional. He knows now how life- changing it can be for a youngster to have raw talent nurtured and directed into the polished form.
He also argues that it's the sheer enthusiasm of his casts that prompts him to keep his foot on the throttle.
But there is, as he himself admits, his own personality to consider. "I guess I'm the sort of person who just does it, and to hell with the consequences."