Welby 3rd-graders involved in every aspect of opera

SOUTH JORDAN — An elaborate summer-theater production that went onstage recently was written, mounted and performed by 25 third-graders at Welby Elementary School.

While the opera "The Emperor's New Rain Forest" will most likely garner rave reviews by parents, the most important thing for teacher Mary Ann Larsen is what the kids have gotten out of it.

"It was wonderful," Larsen said. "It was an incredible experience, because there's so much writing involved, and so much of listening skills. Everything that we teach in school is integrated into this process."

Larsen said "The Emperor's New Rain Forest" is literally "opera by children" because the kids are involved with every aspect, from writing the libretto and composing the music to putting on the production themselves.

It all starts, she says, with writing the libretto. "The process of writing the libretto is really a writing process," Larsen explained, adding that it significantly enhances the writing curriculum the children are learning that year. "What we're actually doing is, they're integrating music into the language-arts curriculum, which in third grade is writing. So we write the libretto, we re-write it, and edit, and re-write it again, until it's exactly the way we want it, and it really sounds like a nice, flowing, interesting story, and that's when it's ready for the musical score."

At that point, a music specialist from Logan's Utah Festival Opera Company comes in. For "The Emperor's New Rain Forest," that specialist was Autumn Hunt. "What we do," Larsen said, "is, we get the kids in a circle around us and ask them, 'How would the frog say this line,' or 'How would the jaguars in the rain forest want to say this part of the story?' And what we do is, line for line, have them sing it into the tape recorder. So they're really designing their own music."

Then the specialist takes the children's ideas and puts them into a cohesive score. The teacher is provided with a written version and two CDs — one with a singer and the instruments, and one with just the instrumental tracks. "I burn the CD for every student in my class and at home," Larsen said, "and they listen to the opera and read the words, so that when it comes time to perform the opera, they have all the words down pat. So it's really an amazing process."