The enchanting, musical adventure of “Finding Nemo Jr.” was put on by local youths on Saturday in a show that emphasized the importance of family, embracing adventure and pushing your limits.
The play, which was the culmination of a two-week theater camp put on by Nicholaus and Corinne Sandner’s Lamp Post Creative Learning Center, was held at the First Assembly of God Church after a last minute location change. The 2 p.m. showing was nearly full, with the church pews packed full of families and community members waiting to see the performance, which lasted about an hour.
Emberlynn Molina sparkled as Nemo with her acting, witty handling of her Nemo puppet and singing voice, bringing the lucky-finned fish to life. Brian Sandner kept the audience laughing with his portrayal of Nemo’s paranoid father, Marlin, and Grace Noyes perfectly captured Dory’s lovable, albeit forgetful, personality.
Athena Cabauatan, who played Crush the turtle, wowed the audience with her powerful singing voice and stage presence, and the entirety of the cast immersed the audience in the underwater tale of a dad who adventures across the ocean to find his missing son, Nemo, with the help of a fish with short-term memory loss, a turtle who encouraged him to hold on a little less tightly and sharks who tested his bravery.
The cast and crew of “Finding Nemo Jr.” had two weeks to prepare for the show, and Nicholaus, Corinne, their children and other volunteers worked tirelessly to prepare the stage, props and the fish puppets that were brought to life on stage.
The team only had three weeks to create the intricate puppets that were a large part of bringing the show to life. Not only did these puppets provide a visual for Marlin, Nemo, Dory and the other fish in the story, but many of their mouths also moved and their eyes blinked, widened and squinted, thanks to mechanisms created by Brian Sandner.
Brian designed and built the talking and blinking mechanisms for the main character puppets, finding inspiration from online designs. Jonathan Sandner sculpted the characters in clay, which were used to create patterns. The patterns were then scanned, enlarged using Photoshop and printed.
Campers then traced the patterns onto EVA foam, cut out the pieces and assembled them with contact cement to form “character shells.” Next, the talking and blinking mechanisms were inserted into the shells and secured with glue.
The plexiglass bodies were attached to PVC pipe handles that allowed the fish characters to have a “swimming motion” on stage. T-shirt material was sewn into body shapes and slipped over the puppets like socks and fastened to the puppet’s heads with Velcro to allow access to the talking and blinking mechanism. Other details were painted onto the puppets using airbrushes, paintbrushes and more.
The puppets’ eyes were made from plastic Christmas tree bulbs that were mounted to the blinking mechanism using wires that were shaped like windshield wipers and controlled by a string loop. The talking mechanism used springs, metal brackets and bicycle brakes connected to a trigger on the handle to allow the actors to control their fish’s mouth movement using a loop attached to string.
“We were thrilled that the kids in the camp learned to use them so quickly,” Nicholaus Sandner told The Journal after the performance. “It was really fun to see the character mannerisms they put into performing the puppets.”
