WHS theater, culinary, choir students combine forces for ‘Oh, What a Knight’

Kelly Gregersen has long been fond of the dinner theater concept, a form of entertainment that combines a multi-course restaurant meal with a staged play or musical.

“Number one, it comes with food, which is always a ‘like’ for me,” the Washougal High School (WHS) drama teacher said, laughing. “But I (also) like the format. It’s a little bit of scripted work. It’s some improvisational work. It just pushes actors in all directions. Instead of performing on stage, they’re performing right in front of the audience. It really pushes them to do theater at a different level, and I love that.”

Recently, Gregersen approached his colleagues in the school’s career and technical education (CTE) and drama departments with the idea of putting on a dinner theater performance and received enthusiastic responses, indicating that the “dinner and a show” format might stick around in Washougal for years to come.

The WHS drama, choir and culinary departments will present “Oh, What a Knight,” a Renaissance-era madrigal dinner theater performance, at 6 p.m. Friday, Feb. 17, and Saturday, Feb. 18, at the school cafeteria.

“I think that one of the most valuable things we can do is open the kids’ eyes to different people, different ways of doing things,” Gregersen said. “By bringing different clubs together, it just sends that message that there’s no boundaries — you can explore different things, try different things. I really love that. I love the fact that we’re all Washougal, we’re not just ‘this club’ and ‘that club,’ so we can all pull together and do something as a group. And I like working with colleagues that I don’t normally get to work with.”

Tickets cost $20 each and include a three-course dinner featuring three entree options — wild boar stew, cornish game hen or vegan coconut polenta.

The performance will be set in a Renaissance-era castle and feature an original story written by Gregersen, as well as period-themed madrigal songs.

“It’s a unique opportunity for our culinary students, as well as our actors and our singers,” WSD career and technical education (CTE) director Margaret Rice said. “I think it’s really cool. It’s definitely something they haven’t been involved in before.”

Gregersen became familiar with the format during his tenure at Northwest Christian College (now Bushnell University) in Eugene, Oregon.

“I had directed a number of madrigal Renaissance dinners when I was younger, and I fell in love with them,” he said. “I was in conversation with the culinary department and the choir, and kind of just threw this out as an idea of, ‘In between our two big shows of the year, it would be so fun to do something together as a big group. We’ve got such a fantastic culinary program, and we’ve got fantastic singers, so it would be fun to showcase everybody.’ I threw out the idea of a madrigal dinner and people bit, and it just grew from there.”

The drama students will perform the play in small acts between the meal courses, served by the culinary students and heralded by songs from the choir students.

“It’s a pretty fun, simple story, and since we’re running it right after Valentine’s Day, it’s a romantic story,” Gregersen said. “It’s much smaller than a traditional show — it’s about a 30-minute script. But it’s interspersed (between the meal courses), so it stretches throughout the night. We’ve got the choir doing madrigal songs, that Renaissance-era style of singing. I have a few specialty acts that will be performing. And then some of the characters will be interacting improvisationally over to the sides of the audience. There’s going to be something going on throughout the night, and I think it’ll just make it an interesting evening.”

Rice said there have already been discussions about bringing back the “dinner and a show” format in subsequent years, albeit in different forms.

“We could change the era (that they’re set in),” she said. “There’s a lot of different ideas. We could do a disco theme, or maybe we do a 1920s (piece). … It’s an opportunity for students to meet other students that maybe they have classes with but haven’t had a chance to really get to know. There’s a lot of value to that. It’s expanding the students’ knowledge of each other and appreciation for each other, using each other’s ideas to make things happen.”

Tickets are available to purchase at payments.efundsforschools.com/v3/districts/56479 or at the WHS office through Friday, Feb. 10.