The pharaoh stood center stage on a high platform. He turned around to face the front of the stage in a blast of fog, and his plain robe fell and disappeared to reveal a rhinestone jumpsuit.
The cast and crew around the Kelly Walsh High School auditorium cheered and applauded the character’s entrance they’d just seen for the first time during rehearsal last Thursday for “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”
“It’s all I’ve ever wanted in my life!” the play’s director Dustin Hebert yelled and he jumped up and down on the platform.
Later as the scene continued, Carter Sanders as Pharaoh descended a staircase singing the “Song of the King” with Elvis-style moves to more applause from fellow students. Shining gold, life-sized cow heads balanced atop actors’ heads as they sang the backup for the rock tune.
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“Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” opening Friday at Kelly Walsh, is meant to be a spectacle, Hebert said, like the production at Casper College that convinced him as a high school graduate to pursue theater there.
Twenty years later, Hebert dedicates the Kelly Walsh musical production to his late mentor and friend, Thomas Empey, who was head of the Casper College theater department at the time. Empey died in November 2016.
“It was watching the actors on stage, the joy in their face,” Hebert recalled. “And we’re dealing with the exact same age group. And it must have been the director that put that joy there. Because their eyes were bright and shining, they told the story so well, they were excited, they had the energy to do it and everything was just visually pleasing. It was the closest thing that I had ever seen to professional theater.”
Inspiration and dedication
Hebert strives to recreate the same joy, energy and sense of community he discovered at Casper College.
Inspiration from his mentor weaves through the production. The cow heads on stage were created for the 1999 show, along with some of the same costumes also on loan from the college.
Other ideas and costumes are new, like the pharaoh’s jumpsuit and the dreamcoat handmade by Kelly Walsh’s costume designer, Beth Burgess. In this production, Joseph’s coat is a quilt incorporating all the patterns and colors from the cloaks of Joseph’s 11 brothers, to add the idea of a family heirloom.
When the brothers become jealous of the coat, they rip their colors from it and later reconstruct it in this production.
“And instead of having this magical coat flying from the ceiling that’s just supposed to be magical, it’s actually part of a family,” Hebert said. “And I thought that that would be a good thing for the kids to talk about, for the kids to sort of grasp. And I don’t see lot of people talking about that so I figured it would be a good metaphor for community involvement and group involvement and global involvement when we look at big pictures for what we can do as a society.”
While many know the movie version and the show is often thought of as cheesy, Hebert worked to bring out the substance of the story.
“I really tried to figure out a way to make it important and very, very much a story of our time,” Hebert said.
The play tells the story of Joseph, whose envious brothers sell him into slavery. But through character, luck and hard work he overcomes obstacles, earns a high position appointed by the pharaoh and saves Egypt from famine.
“He’s going to stay positive, and in the end the positivity is revisited upon him in a sort of a karmic standpoint,” Hebert said.
The show features more than 100 students among the cast, chorus, orchestra and crew along with 20 younger students ranging from first-graders through middle schoolers acting alongside the high school students.
“When Tom would cast these shows, he would try to make sure the community saw the goodness that was out there and the talent range,” Hebert said. “And so that’s one of the reasons why we have so many people on stage as much as possible — to involve kids.”
The KW show involves other faculty, including choir director Katrina Rooney and orchestra and band directors Gary DePaolo and Brent Rose, respectively, directing the pit musicians and even a couple of teachers playing in the pit for the variety of musical numbers including “Go, Go, Go Joseph” and “Any Dream Will Do.”
One of the students, Tess Bjorksten, is the assistant director and created on her own the introductory piece for the play, which gives a view of what takes place in pre-show preparation with dance, music, make-up, hair and other preparations. It’s a style Hebert first learned about from Empey, known as Brechtian theater, which allows the audience to see moving parts of a show, Hebert said.
“It’s a production that’s absolutely coming together not because of anything that I’m doing, but because of the work of the group as a whole,” Hebert said.
The younger kids’ costumes match the tribe colors of the brothers and their wives in the play to emphasize the idea of families and togetherness, he said.
“Tom always really liked the idea that Casper College was a group of people that came together in the middle of Wyoming to have fun and do theater in a place that a person wouldn’t likely think that theater would exist,” Hebert said.
One thing that made Empey successful as a teacher and in growing the theater program at Casper College was the relationships he built with his students, Hebert said.
Hebert became friends with Empey as well as his family, who also were involved in the theater. Among them was Empey’s son, Nick Empey, who played the pharaoh in the show 20 years ago.
“He really enjoyed the one-on-one conversations, getting to know the kids,” Hebert said of Empey. “It’s not just a business structure; it’s a relationship. And Tom always built fantastic relationships with his kids.”
Connecting past and future
Hebert had just graduated high school in Colorado and was touring Casper College when he was first inspired by Empey. He was debating whether he wanted to pursue theater. At his high school, theater was viewed as something fun to do, but it wasn’t until he saw the production at Casper College that he began to see the possibilities, he said.
“It was never looked on as a career or as a possibility to educate others,” he said, “so there was a lot of the pieces that I was missing that we’re trying to fill in now.”
He happened to visit during the gala night for the summer musical, “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.” Empey gave him and his parents tickets.
Hebert majored in theater at Casper College from 1999-2001 and went on to Weber State University on Ogden, Utah. He worked professionally in Park City, Denver, southwestern Colorado and moved to New York for a year before he decided to go into teaching English.
He ended up back in Casper teaching at KW and took over the theater director job when longtime director Michael Stedillie retired three years later in 2016. Now he’s applying for a masters of fine art program in theater directing with a thesis statement that he wrote about new production.
“And now I’m here doing the same show I saw 20 years ago,” he said.
“We’re trying to sort of recreate the past a little bit,” Hebert said, “and add our own little voice as we go forward.”