A captivating world premiere of the heartfelt contemporary musical “Wild Child” kick started Laguna Playhouse’s fall season Saturday night, Sept. 12.
A delve into teen angst and value-of-self struggles, the first public staging of “Wild Child” proved oh-so-well developed and fully realized.
The story compels: unknown to each other, six high school age teens, at the insistence of their parents, are led by a pair of social workers on a forced-march northern Utah wilderness hike … lasting 90 days?!
The play is about fostering therapeutic engagement and, ideally, breakthroughs for the teens’ true natures to emerge and flourish in nature.
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Davide Costa and Jennifer Noble appear in a scene from “Wild Child,” playing at Laguna Playhouse through Oct. 4. (Photo by Joan Marcus)
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Davide Costa and Jennifer Noble appear in a scene from “Wild Child,” playing at Laguna Playhouse through Oct. 4. (Photo by Joan Marcus)
Across the show’s two acts, the young characters are physically distant from emotionally restrictive social agents including addictive online gaming, drug consumption, discord with parents and the loss or absence of significant figures in their lives.
As Darin, one of show’s central characters, sings in the opening number “Intervention,” “I believe a day is coming/where I am not the problem/but tragically, that day is not/today.”
In its first full season under producing executive director Adele Adkins, Laguna Playhouse is no longer creating and mounting home-grown narrative theater.
Instead, minus an on-staff artistic director and with reduced staffing (the 106-year-old theater has been shedding accumulated debt), Adkins is presenting shows from outside, contracted producers.
“Wild Child” comes to Laguna Beach from an East Coast organization called The Breathe Project.
This consortium of theater and other media strivers brings ambitious biographies though their projects aren’t particularly well known to Southern California.
Based on the engrossing “Wild Child,” this would seem to be our local loss.
This musical is probably closest in subject matter and tone to the Tony Award winning “Dear Evan Hansen,” though this new work refreshingly keeps apart from two inevitable teen drama themes in “Hansen” — the specter of teen suicide and romantic couplings among the principals.
“Wild Child” runs on an assured book and lyrics and an appealing pop score from Breathe members Dan Marshall and Julianne Wick Davis.
The pair have written several other musicals across the past decade as well as being theater educators at the college level.
As a musical rooted in teen behavior and outcomes, under strong direction from John Simpkins, the engaging and energizing ensemble of 10 feels fresh, of the moment.
Davis’ generous 24-song pop score is inviting. It funds the entire cast of characters with solos and duets as well as instances of impeccable ensemble singing, a sonic strength of the company.
An off-stage band under Music Director Noah Landis provides excellent accompaniment, well heard in Eric Backus’ clear sound design.
The songs are tightly integrated with the story, welling up from dialogue seamlessly in a very organic, naturalistic fashion.
Marshall’s lyrics are nicely integrated with his book.
In “O.M.F.G.,” a raucous mini pushback from the ensemble against the parents who have marooned them out in Utah backcountry, they slyly sing “When you are drowning/they toss you a brick/the only bone they throw you/is a bone they have to pick.”
The show has been cast using an outside agency with all performers, all actors’ equity association members, making their Laguna Playhouse debuts.
As the two high school leads, Davide Costa as Darin and Salima Gangani as Rina are both gamer addicts with differing natures. Costa projects Darin’s artistic sensitivity with appealing, natural grace, while Gangani successfully balances her character’s confusions and sensitivities.
A fun wild card aspect in the show is that both of these characters have online avatars in the “Wild Child 4.3” online game who, invisible to the show’s other characters, intermittently pop up as helpful headspace sounding boards to their real-life counterparts.
Yana Perrault as Roses and Brian Whitehill as Kiton impactfully bound in — with flamboyant costuming from designer Alex Jaeger — and periodically engage in dialogue as well as singing.
The rest of the cast it feels at one in the communality of purpose as well as its discontents. Chad Doreck’s Collins and Jennifer Noble’s Whitney are the 30somethings in charge, Whitney as therapist-in-chief, while Collins is the uber backwoodsman keeping the group safe on real-life levels.
The production is a handsome mix of Michael Schweikardt’s sizable woodsy-colored fixed set with Nathan Scheuer and Cat Wilson’s projection designs. These effectively highlight the avatar appearances as well as display screen presentations of rugged canyon walls, rushing streams and assorted fauna as a backdrop to the ongoing hiking.
It’s a pretty good trek, but there are a couple of plotting bones worth picking.
Given the millions of participants in online gaming across the planet, Darin and Rina, out in the middle of Nowhere, Utah, discovering their online avatars are best buds in the Wild Child 4.3 game strains credulity.
Late in the play, team leaders Whitney and Collins righteously declare they hadn’t known/will now object to their employers involuntary, traumatizing kidnapping of two of the kids from their bedrooms.
That this violent approach would be news to the counselors rings hollow, especially since Collins earlier declared he’d been leading the hikes for a decade and “(I’ve) seen everything.”
No matter.
If “Wild Child” is representative of this season’s energies and aspirations to come at Laguna Playhouse — impeccable artistic values, albeit briefly on display during a meager, five-show 2026-27 season — things could turn out to be wildly worthwhile.
‘Wild Child’
Rating: 3 1/2 stars (out of four possible)
Where: Laguna Playhouse, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach
When: Regular performances through Oct. 4. 7:30 p.m., Tuesdays-Saturdays; 2 p.m., Saturdays; 1 p.m., Sundays. (Additional performance: 2 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 24.)
Tickets: $86-$131
Information: 949-247-5787; lagunaplayhouse.com