BUCKLAND — Mohawk Trail Regional School students and staff members invite the community to take a short break from the real world and laugh at the misunderstandings, chaos and hijinks of brothers Nick and Nigel Bottom in 1595 London as they attempt to out-write William Shakespeare by inventing the world’s first musical.
The school will present “Something Rotten Jr.” on Friday, March 13, at 7 p.m. and Saturday, March 14, at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. in the auditorium. Tickets are $15 for adults and $12 for students and senior citizens at the door.
Music Director Amy Roberts-Crawford said the show provides plenty of opportunities for audiences to laugh as they follow the Bottom brothers on their quest to write the next big theatrical hit.
“Everybody loves William Shakespeare, and the Bottom brothers are trying to come up with the next big hit,” Roberts-Crawford said. “They end up using a soothsayer to tell them what the next big hit is going to be, and they’re like, ‘The next big thing in theater is musicals,’ but they leave before the soothsayer has shared the full vision, which creates a misunderstanding. … They get it a little wrong and chaos ensues.”
Senior Alex Niquette, who plays Nigel Bottom, said they are a big fan of the production and they were excited when it was announced as this year’s musical.
“I was super excited ’cause I was super into the original musical when I was in eighth grade. And Nigel is my favorite character, mostly because I relate to him a lot,” Niquette said. “He’s very neurotic and anxious, and he’s a writer. So it’s fun to play it up a lot because I relate to him a lot, but I’m not so outwardly anxious, so it’s fun to put my all into it.”
In selecting which musical to perform, Roberts-Crawford said she and Stage Director Jessica Choiniere wanted to find something lighthearted with a small cast that would work with their small student body and excite the students.
“We had our first read-through in December, and it was like, ‘Ooh, I can already see this coming together,'” Roberts-Crawford said.
Niquette said the cast has known and worked together for years, which allowed them to build chemistry and have fun while performing.
“We have a lot of really good chemistry because we all know each other, and it feels good to act with them,” Niquette said. “And I think that comes across.”
Junior Livia McGeorge plays Portia in the show, the daughter of a strict Puritan who falls in love with Nigel Bottom. She said it’s a fun role to play, and the show itself is a fun acting exercise, because while it does not use “old-timey language,” it’s still set in the 1500s and she has to pretend she knows nothing of the modern world, even when the script makes jokes about and references things that will not happen for hundreds of years.
“I was really excited when I first got Portia. She’s a very fun character; she’s bubbly and she kind of goes against her father’s views because she’s a Puritan,” McGeorge said.
Roberts-Crawford and Choiniere are both graduates of Mohawk Trail and participated in the drama program. Choiniere, who graduated in 2020, said it’s been great to rejoin the Mohawk Trail drama program and see it through the eyes of a teacher.
“I’m excited to come back and see the process from the other side,” Choiniere said. “To come back and help put it all together, to look at it from the eye of a director and designer as opposed to an actor is really eye-opening and it’s such a huge change, but I’m so grateful to be able to come back and be in this community.”
She added that her goal as stage director is to push the students to be the best performers they can be. This has included expanding rehearsal times so students are working longer hours and more days each week, and offering critiques, so when students take the stage on opening night, they are confident they can put on a good show.
“I would find myself frustrated with directors because they kept critiquing everything I did. It felt like I wasn’t doing well enough, but now that I’m on this side and I’m actually doing that, I see what they meant,” Choiniere recounted. “I’m not saying you’re a bad actor; it’s that I’ve seen you do amazing things and I want you to do that consistently so you can prove to the audience how awesome you are.”
Choiniere said she’s excited to see the Mohawk Trail drama program grow. She’s teaching a new drama class for middle schoolers, which has helped increase seventh and eighth grade involvement in the show. Roberts-Crawford added that there are 17 students in the production, including four students from Buckland-Shelburne Elementary School.
Roberts-Crawford and Choiniere said they hope people come to the performances of “Something Rotten Jr.” to see how hard the students have been working, while enjoying a break from the world of 2026 and stepping back into the 1500s.
“The way the world is right now, we hope to just give everybody an hour and a half of light-hearted enjoyment,” Roberts-Crawford said. “We want to give people an escape from what’s happening in our world right now. We want to give them a reason to laugh.”