The music that Lake Braddock High School senior Bryan Case often composes has more in common with James Taylor than the Elizabethan age.
A student musician who plays piano, guitar, and trumpet, among other instruments, Case calls himself a "choir kid," but pitched in to help the drama department out with its fall production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
"It's cool to be able to arrange music according to what the words dictate, not [based on] the triteness of a melody you hear in your head," said Case, president of the Student Choral Board, and a member of the school's guitar ensemble, who composed music to go with the words of Shakespeare for three key scenes in the play.
"What he's done sounds a lot like a mix between Dave Matthews and John Mayer," said Lake Braddock Theater's artistic director R.L. Mirabel, the play's director.
No surprise, those are two of the influences which Case credits during his burgeoning music career.
Case is a regular in choral productions, singing the national anthem at school sporting events, and has performed for three years at the "LBT Unplugged" open-mike fund-raiser for the theater program.
"Every year, I say 'Send me your best guy who wants to write the music for the show,'" said Mirabel.
This year, that guy was Case.
THE MUSIC Case wrote accompanies two sets of lyrics which Shakespeare wrote, one a lullaby for the fairy queen, Titania, and the other to celebrate the reunion of the queen and her estranged husband Oberon. They are intended to be songs, but obviously, Shakespeare never provided music.
"It's difficult, because you don't want to do anything that strays too much from what people know as the rhythm of what he does," said Case about the composition process. "But it's easy to work around the rhyme structure Shakespeare does."
This year's production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" will be the fourth time Lake Braddock has put on the play. Mirabel said he has created a tradition of staging the play every four years, while he is director.
"I had this idea that if I made this deal that every four years, every kid who goes through the four-year program has this experience, even if you played a fairy as a freshman and a lead as a senior," he said.
RATHER THAN dreading the experience, members of the Braddock theater program said they look forward to doing "Midsummer."
"Finally to get to high school and to be on this stage is the culmination of a dream I've had since I was young. To finally be here is really exciting," said senior Kerry Kaleba, whose older brother was an assistant stage manager for the production in 1992.
This year's version will be staged in present-day New York City, much like the past ones. One twist — Theseus, the duke of Athens, will become "Donald Theseus," and the production will have a decidedly reality television-themed slant.
"I think there'd be a revolution if I didn't do it. The kids who were in eighth grade when they first saw it would say 'What are you doing? I've been working on my Puck monologue for three years,'" said Mirabel.