Photos by Miles Jeffer, Jordan High junior & DPS Pixel & Pen Creatives photographer.
Jordan High School is taking center stage - complete with acrobatics! The school has been selected first in the nation to premiere the high-school adaptation of the Broadway musical, Water for Elephants, based on the 2006 book by the same name.
The critically-acclaimed musical, with seven Tony® nominations, had a nine-month run on Broadway in 2024. The story, set in 1931 during the Great Depression, features Jacob, a man who is forced to drop out of veterinary school due to a tragic family event, but winds up becoming the vet for a traveling circus, where he also happens to find love. The musical is known for its spectacular visual effects, and Jordan is pulling out all the stops.
Jordan students are using a number of different skills in preparation for the play. Not only are they learning their lines, but some are also learning how to make lifelike puppets portraying circus animals, and some have been training to perform such popular acrobatics as the trapeze, the lyra (an aerial spinning hoop), aerial silks, and gymnastics.
“I think there is tremendous growth with this for our students,” said Jordan drama teacher Olivia Bellido. “They are learning how to be super proud of producing something so important.”
From Broadway to Garrett Road
Bellido was in New York to accept the Stephen Schwartz Musical Theatre Teacher of the Year Award last year. This national award recognizes a teacher's outstanding achievement and impact on students and the broader community. While there, she met representatives with Broadway Licensing, which owns the rights to many Broadway plays and musicals.
“They were searching for a ‘pilot program’ partnership to revamp the Broadway version into a high school production,” said Bidello. “I said, ‘Oh that would be my dream!’ So, literally without thinking about it, I accepted it.”
Auditions were held in May, and students and teachers involved with the musical showed up the first two weeks of August to begin researching and visualizing how they would produce it. And they’ve brought in some heavy-hitters to meet with students, including Rick Elice, who wrote the book (script) for the Broadway version, and representatives of the PigPen Theatre Co., who wrote the lyrics.
Choreographers were invited to teach the students not only dance moves, but also to help them master some of the challenging acrobatics derring-do. And a master puppeteer worked with students to create the lifelike creatures, which include an elephant, orangutan, lion, peacocks, and big cats.
The musical addresses some mature themes, such as domestic abuse and animal abuse, but the script has been modified to be appropriate for high school students to perform and audiences to enjoy. Bellido had a major role in working with Broadway Licensing to revise the script accordingly, without diluting the story’s impact.
“(Broadway Licensing is) giving high schools a lot of freedom to make revisions,” said Bellido. “For us, we put a lot of content back in that they had taken out of the original script. I’m ready to do art the way that it’s written and not dumb it down just because they are children.”
History Lessons
Student learning didn’t stop merely at lines and moves with Water for Elephants. There was an ample amount of history that students researched to support the development of their sometimes complex characters.
“This is a story about the Great Depression, and we are a bunch of teenagers in 2025, Ms. Bellido had us sit down for a couple of days and do research about what was going on during those times,” said Cameron Brown, one of the stars of the musical. “She showed us documentaries and had us do projects to help us understand the context of the show we would be performing.”
Cameron’s character is probably one of the more complex ones. He plays Camel, an aging “roustabout,” or circus worker who sets up tents and other hard-labor tasks. Camel serves as a mentor of sorts to Jacob.
Cameron is a wrestler who currently plans to pursue a degree and career in architecture. He was recruited to be in the show due to a shortage of male actors. But has he possibly been bitten by the acting bug?
“I didn’t realize I would enjoy it so much. It's definitely started to grow on me,” he said.