Student Profiles

You would be hard-pressed to find a play more suited to first-graders than HONK!, a musical-comedy inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen tale, The Ugly Duckling, with its themes of being different, fitting in, tolerance, acceptance, and love. And what better way to experience the play than to see it live on stage, with one of your classmates in a starring role.

That was precisely the experience of young thespian Cordiana’s first-grade class last spring when they traveled to Hyde Park for a Riverside Theatre Works production of HONK!, with Cordiana herself starring as Fluff, one of Ugly’s duck siblings. The outing was funded by the Maureen Baker Fund, a special BB&N arts fund named for a beloved former kindergarten teacher.

For Cordiana, a budding actress and Riverside regular who has played the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland and is currently rehearsing a role as a frog, it was a thrill to have her class come see her perform. “It made me feel pretty good,” she says.

And for her classmates, the play was a great opportunity to discuss some of those challenging themes. Afterward in class they talked about difference, about different kinds of difference, and about how words can hurt people. They talked about why Cordiana, as Fluff, was sometimes mean, while in real life they know her as a nice girl and a good friend.

Do people at BB&N ever treat each other the way the animals treat Ugly in the play? Cordiana is asked. “No,” she replies. “BB&N is a nice school. People don’t really beat each other up.”

“The barnyard would be boring if we were all the same,” says a character in HONK!. The same could be said of BB&N.