By AARON MUELLER
Dowagiac Daily News

When 29 cast members of Barn Swallow Theatre’s children production of Willy Wonka met at the first rehearsal, they were very quiet. They came from all across the area, and very few of the children knew each other.

“The first several weeks of rehearsal, I was concerned they did not know each other very well,” director Bev Smith said. “The rehearsals were very quiet. They just sat and read their scripts.”

But by the fourth week of rehearsals, the cast had become very tightly knit.

“And now I can’t get them to be quiet,” Smith said with a laugh. The production, which runs through Sunday at Southwestern Michigan College, is a children’s version of the Wonka Broadway play. The audience will recognize tunes from the classic score in “The Candy Man,” “Pure Imagination” and “Oompa Loompa.”

Smith said part of the reason the play drew children from Dowagiac, Cassopolis, Edwardsburg, Constantine and even Granger, Ind., is that children love the Roald Dahl tale.

Smith has enjoyed watching the children become friends. “The cast has been working together beautifully,” she said. “The experienced ones have been helpful to the newbies. I am charmed by how everyone in the cast has adopted the youngest members and been really like a family.”

Smith encourages people from throughout southwest Michigan to come out and support youth theater.

“A live play has much more power than stories told by a flat screen like a movie or TV show,” she said.