- May 5, 2024
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For Flagler Palm Coast High School drama teacher Mary Beale, the iconic phrase at the end of the FPC spring musical “The Wizard of Oz” has special meaning to her.
“‘There’s no place like home,’” Beale said. “It’s very graphic to me, after being in Egypt for six months, that home is really the place you want to be.”
Beale, who taught at FPC for 26 years before retiring last year to teach in Egypt, returned to FPC in March when former teacher Ed Koczergo resigned.
The show was already scheduled when Beale took over, only allowing half the normal time to prepare for the production, which incorporates 75 cast and crew members, including a 25-person orchestra and 10 Phoenix Academy students as munchkins. It will be the largest production ever to be done at FPC, according to Beale.
“It is a real collaboration of all the arts here,” Beale said, “which is also a very productive kind of thing because we have the technical theater, directed by Jack Nieberlein, choral director Amy Fulmer, and the band in the pit, directed by John Seth.”
Ed Beckett’s art students also created posters and projections for the show.
“The coordination between all of it is the real trick, and the key, because we’ve had a limited number of days in the auditorium,” Beale said.
But the play will go on.
The show will take the stage 7 p.m. Thursday, May 12; Friday May 13; and 2 and 7 p.m. Saturday, May 14, at the Flagler Auditorium, 5500 E. State Road 100.
Tickets are $12 for adults and $8 for students.
“What I would like to emphasize is that we all know the story of ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ and we all know that it’s a children’s story,” Beale said. “And yet, the underlying themes of it — of looking for a thinking person, and one who is a feeling person, and one who can have the courage of his convictions — is something we would like not just our children to understand but our adults as well.”
