A Lighter Shade of Noir

It is funny and fast-paced. There were jokes in it for the adults and jokes for younger kids and the whole audience was laughing.

Our production of A Lighter Shade of Noir was a great success! Our audience raved about the show, both how fun the story was and how great our student actors portrayed their parts. This play got one of the best responses of my 6 years here at Strack Intermediate. Thank you so much Theatrefolk for having such great scripts available for our middle school community.

The grade 7 to 9 students had a blast with this show. They loved the characters and the style of the production. We were always laughing in rehearsal and they got such positive feedback after performing. It was a great success.

I greatly enjoyed directing 'A Lighter Shade of Noir' last year with my middle school theater students. It had everything I was looking for in a script for 6th, 7th and 8th graders: lots of parts for girls or parts that could be changed to female roles, action without lots of fighting, multiple character scenes that had things to do while other people were talking, a main story line but also sub-plots, links to school subjects (like literature and history), and most importantly - dialogue that I could stand listening to over and over in rehearsal that gave the students motivation to look deeper and deeper into their character development.

I hope you write more for theater, especially children's theater. We need more good writing for these young actors.

Sharon Boski

I sincerely enjoyed directing your creation. There were lots of wonderful characters and I had a great bunch of students with creative ideas. Many of the plays I read before I chose one have similar themes but yours piqued my interest in the first couple of pages.