Rhinebeck Teens Go Greek

The Center for Performing Arts at Rhinebeck will present a production of “The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical” through its Teens on Stage program. Performed in the company’s barn-style mainstage in Rhinebeck, N.Y., the production will run Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from Sept. 22 through Oct. 1. Directed and choreographed by Lynne Czajka with musical direction by Andrew Stein; the show originated Off-Broadway in New York City with music and lyrics by Rob Rokicki and a book by Joe Tracz. Based on the New York Times best-selling middle-grade series by Rick Riordan, “Percy Jackson & the Olympians,” the story follows a troubled 11-year-old Manhattanite who discovers he is the product of a modern-day mortal/mythological coupling between his working-class single mother and the Ancient Greek God of the oceans, Poseidon. 

In Riordan’s world, the mythic monsters and nature deities of Antiquity moved west to follow industrial progression and now dwell in the kitschy pizzaz of the United States, along with contemporary mores and 21st-century half-mortal offspring. Zeus reigns from a secret floor atop the Empire State Building, Hades rules over soul-sucking Hollywood in Hel-L.A., the messenger god Hermes dons running lycra, and Poseidon wears Bermuda shorts to fish. Percy and the other children sired through parental affairs with celestial beings are shunted off not to an Eton-que boarding school but to summer camp, where they study combat with the centaur Chiron, the trainer of legendary heroes from Achilles to Aristaeus, who was painted by Auguste-Clément Chrétien, Giovanni Battista Cipriani, Jean-Baptiste Regnault and many more. A significant leg up (human or horse) that Riordan has over J.K. Rowling is that young readers may very well walk away with a subconscious education in the Classics, able to identify a caduceus, an aspis, the legendary children of Echida or the Trials of Hercules. As Riordan’s fictional gods moved west, he fulfilled their prophecy through his writing: ancient stories live on as they find new readers.

For tickets at The Center for Performing Arts go to www.centerforperformingarts.org