EVAN CARAVELLI/Arizona Daily Wildcat Director of Debut and Encore! acting program Michael Swanson offers a critique of a sketch in the Theater Arts Building yesterday afternoon.

If you've always wanted to take an acting class, but never had the money, time or black turtleneck to do it, you might consider spending $6 for a 45-minute crash course that will teach AND entertain you.

On Dec. 8, the artsy folks in the northwest corner of campus will present Debut's "Acting Lessons for the Red-Headed Step-Child" followed by Encore! (not what comes after a standing ovation, but the School of Theatre Arts' touring revue for musical theatre freshmen). Encore!'s show is called "The Song is You."

Both Debut and Encore!, for acting and musical theater freshman, respectively, are intended to introduce the school's newest members to their focus in the arts and allow them to perform for an audience.

"It's called 'Acting Lessons for the Red-Headed Step-Child' because it is exactly that - some of the scenes are focused on acting lessons," said Debut's director Michael Swanson.

"Acting Lessons for the Red-Headed Step-Child" is a collection of scenes and monologues intended to allow freshmen to apply their academic studies by performing in front of an audience for the first time on a UA stage.

The taught-performance approach is an adaptive piece from Richard Boleslavsky's text "Acting: The First Six Lessons."

"What we've done is I've taken those lessons, adapted them to contemporary language and I abridged them, and the first three of them are incorporated into our show," said Swanson of the Boleslavsky text and freshmen debut. "They were originally written in dialogue form between a student and a teacher. So we've just adapted them and then woven other scenes around those three."

Swanson, who arrived at the UA this fall after teaching in the Midwest, called the experience of putting a show together from other material 'interesting' and 'unusual' for him, but added that he enjoyed working with the actors because they were approaching college theater from a fresh perspective and were open to new ideas.

Freshman David Vick auditioned for entry into School of Theatre Arts' acting program when he was a senior in high school. He sent in a videotape of a monologue and was one of nine people selected.

"I expect that (the audience) will learn a lot about some of the techniques that actors use in order to focus or get into their character," said Vick about "Acting Lessons." "I expect them mostly to laugh because the scenes in between are all comedies and they're all hilarious and improv."

Vick plays a missionary trying to get an ice fisherman to join his faith during one of the intermittent scenes breaking up the three lessons.

Following "Acting Lessons" will be Encore!'s "The Song is You," a music revue that gives tribute to the life and musical work of Jerome Kern. The nine members of the musical theatre freshman class will sing and dance to the songs composed by Kern.

"'Showboat' is his genius creation," said Encore! director and founder Richard Hanson. "It was done in 1927 and 'Oklahoma' and 'Carousel' and all these shows that came about in the '40s and '50s classic period really used his techniques of integration of music and dance and lyric and character."

While the show may not be a debut for the musical theatre freshman, who have already had four road shows, it will still be a first.

"We've already had two shows in classes in October, but this is our big performance in a theater," said musical theatre freshman Jesse Turtz.

Hanson said the school has been doing Encore! for 25 years and that each year, the material for the shows is different.

"We want to produce people who can have careers as actors or singers or dancers," said Hanson.