Aspen Country Day School students highlight America’s history of music in upcoming performance

Eighth grade students at Aspen Country Day School are gearing up for their end-of-year performance, called “Country Roads, Take Me Home.”

It’s a culmination of months of work that will highlight the history of music in America. The eighth grade class at Country Day wrote the script, and students from fourth-eighth grade will perform in the show.

“It’s been really a whole year of putting this together,” said eighth-grader Palmer McCloskey Elston. “Each class we kind of just took it step by step until now you look at the picture and it all really came together.”

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Work on the show began in September, she said. It was inspired by their teacher Wes Lanich, who taught the students music history in sixth grade. 

For months, the students created the world that they will play out in the show. Longtime drama teacher Marci Sketch helped produce the show with the students and fourth grade teacher Annie Garrett choreographed the show.

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In the play, the students will make stops across the country, visiting musical landmarks in different cities, like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Ohio. The show has music that all generations will enjoy, McCloskey Elston said.

“In our audience, we’ll have grandparents going and we’ll also have little kids, so I wanted to have songs that everyone understood,” she said. “And especially with our generation, it can be easy to get a little backtracked and focus on pop and only that … so we definitely wanted to incorporate that but also have music that my grandparents would know.”

The show will include current pop music, blues, jazz, and John Denver, for whom the show’s name pays homage.

Watching the show come together has been McCloskey Elston’s favorite part of the whole process. She remembers when she was younger performing in the eighth grade show and how much she looked up to those students. Now, she gets to be a leader to the younger students, she said.

“I’m just beyond proud that we can get this whole middle school plus the fourth and fifth graders, boys, girls, everyone on stage,” Sketch said. “There’s no exception, and they all find a way to shine on stage, even if theater’s not their love.”
The show will run at the Wheeler Opera House at 5:30 p.m. on May 3 and 4. Tickets are $25 and available on the Wheeler website.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the accurate spelling of one of the student’s names.