Children’s Theatre of Madison:

Middle school students are a notoriously tough audience.
But at a recent theater arts workshop at Wright Middle School in Madison, students shed their inhibitions as they stomped their feet, practiced the breathing exercises of actors and helped make mariachi music.
In the process, they began to appreciate the effort, energy and excitement of producing a play like “Esperanza Rising,” a Children’s Theatre of Madison production that will begin on April 4 and continue weekend performances through April 20.
Members of the Esperanza cast, the director, musicians and others associated with the production ran theater arts workshops at Hawthorne Elementary and Cherokee Middle School in Madison last week as well as at Wright Middle School.
When Jane Schroeder, outreach educator for CTM, asked students in Erika Meyer’s music class whether they had read the book “Esperanza Rising” by Pam Munoz Ryan, Jennifer Neblett, a sixth-grader at Wright, eagerly raised her hand.