The drama department has once again shone a spotlight on their annual Children’s Theater performance.

Instead of following its usual tradition of selecting stories written by the elementary school students to adapt into plays, Diamond Bar High School’s Intermediate Drama decided to base this year’s play on the Dreamworks animated film “Trolls,” a movie many children are familiar with.

“It was a lot different because last year, the children got to write and submit stories and we read through around 300 of them,” senior Arvind Singh said. “But this time we just picked the movie and it was not as time consuming.”

“Trolls,” the movie and play, follows a happy Troll, Poppy, on her journey with bad-tempered Branch to rescue her friends from the miserable Bergens, who invaded their community and captured her fellow Trolls only to devour them in an attempt to be “happy.”  

Drama divided up the work of creating costumes, designing sets, writing scripts and directing scenes among the students.

Unlike previous years when children would visit DBHS to watch the play, the performers travelled to perform at eight elementary schools: Quail Summit, Maple Hill, Collegewood, Westhoff, C.J. Morris, Evergreen, Castle Rock and Vejar. At each school, they held two separate performances: the first for students from kindergarten to third grade and the second for students in fourth and fifth grade. There were around 40 to 60 students watching each performance.

The actors said they hoped to give the students insight on what it is like to be in Drama and inspire them to join in high school.

“We really enjoy performing in general, and we also really like kids,” sophomore Grace Thomas said. “So having two of them together made it a very fun experience. It was nice to be able to interact with kids and see their reaction.”

The most challenging part of performing in front of children, according to the Brahmas, was adapting to each age group and entertaining them.

“We had kindergarteners who had no idea what is going on half the time, so they were just absent minded, which made the place super silent and very awkward,” Singh said. “On the other hand, we had fifth graders who have seen the movie before and they start singing along to the songs, which made it easier to perform for them.”

Performing at different schools was a learning experience for the drama department.

“Throughout this whole process, we learned how to perform better because we were a traveling group and did not have mikes,” sophomore Pailey Kao said. “So we were able to experience how to take down sets, to set them up and also project very loud.