Go behind the curtain at Summer Repertory Theatre in Santa Rosa

When the stage lights go up on a live show, the audience doesn’t stop to study the costumes, makeup or sets, or wonder how many hours of rehearsal it took the actors to learn all of the songs and dances. If the show is good, the crowd just gets caught up in the make-believe.

Every summer, hand-picked theater students from colleges throughout the country convene on the Santa Rosa Junior College campus to spend 11 intense weeks - four weeks of rehearsal, followed by seven weeks of performance - in the Summer Repertory Theatre program, immersed in the reality behind the magic of theater.

Housed for the summer at Sonoma State University, the nearest campus with student housing, the actors commonly work 12-hour days, nearly every day of the week.

“We’ve just been sleeping, waking up and coming back to the theater,” said actor Elliott Styles, 19, of Cambridge, England, who will be a junior at the University of Michigan in the fall.

During the season, a company of 21 actors perform five shows in rotation at two campus venues, but only one show - “Nice Work If You Can Get It” - includes all of them on the same stage at the same time.

“It’s a tough schedule. Rep is hard as it is, and in this rep you’re doing three shows,” said Alex Stewart, 24, of Sacramento, who like many of the actors appears in three of the shows.

“Because the schedule is so tight, there is no time to be bashful in rehearsals,” Stewart said. “It’s trial by fire. You have to take really big risks and make really big choices right away. That is the kind of actor that a professional director is going to want, actors who don’t have to have their hands held.”

Added Styles, “The biggest thing that we’ve all learned is that we can do it. It was daunting and terrifying.”

So far this summer, each actor has experienced something new. For Michele Owens, a recent graduate of the University of Oklahoma, it was performing in three musicals running at the same time, and for Stewart, performing for the first time in a musical by composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, “Merrily We Roll Along.”

One of the new challenges for Styles has been learning to work on sets built on a giant turntable for faster scene changes. “That’s been cool,” he said in a slightly sardonic tone, enhanced by his English accent.

Aaron Clark, who works behind the scenes as a carpenter, has had his own troubles with the revolving turntable. The 19-year-old Santa Rosan, back at Santa Rosa Junior College for the summer after two years at Boise State University in Idaho, said he is glad he studied engineering while away. The knowledge has been handy in solving backstage problems.

“That background transfers very well,” Clark said. In “Merrily We Roll Along,” the trickiness of the revolving turnable - a “revolve” in theater jargon - is enhanced by that show’s giant staircase.

“We had to install a second drive wheel to the revolve, which caused some counterbalance issues,” Clark said, “but we’ve since been able to compensate for that. There was one moment in rehearsals where we wanted the entire cast on the stair unit, but it wasn’t set up that way.”

The problem was overcome by changing the way the actors move around the stage.

“We also built a giant, 20-foot circular ceiling,” Clark said. “There’s a lot of welding in this show because all of the set pieces have a metal frame. It’s a lot of work, but it’s a lot of fun.”

More complicated

Even tasks that may sound simple, like putting on wigs and makeup, are more complicated than they seem, said Sarah Opstad, 37, of Denver, who is in charge of the makeup crew. For the past 13 years she has worked as a hair and makeup specialist with Opera Colorado. For example, the actors are miked to amplify their voices, and the microphones must be firmly anchored in the wigs.

“We’re using 75 wigs this season,” Opstad said. “I think the biggest challenge was being able to build and maintain and create a realistic-looking wig for each actor for each character with the stock that we had. We didn’t just buy these wigs. We’re reusing the stock. We remake these wigs by hand. We’re teaching the art of sewing wigs, hair by hair by hair.”

On a recent morning, the 13 cast members started their day at 9 a.m. in the makeup room, preparing for a morning dress rehearsal.

“It’s crazy in here, because we get them for half an hour,” Opstad said.

Owens, 22, of Edmond, Okla., shares many of her fellow student actors’ dream of a career in professional theater.

“Right now the goal is performance, because that’s what I have a degree in,” she said. “I see myself becoming a director at some point.”

The young actors agree that the Summer Repertory Theatre is a big change from regular college life.

“At school, you’ve got homework and classes and you’re doing a million different things every day and it’s exhausting for that reason, but here we do 12 hours of shows and rehearsals all day,” Styles said. “It’s a way of realizing whether doing shows all day every day is something we really want to do.”

Said Owens, “It’s a really nice practical application of everything we work on at school. I’ve been calling it a boot camp for the rest of my career, because if I can get through this - going from ‘Nice Work if Get It’ in the morning to ‘Rock of Ages’ in the afternoon to doing a Sondheim rehearsal at night - if I can make it through all that, then surely I can do anything.”

The eclectic performance company is the product of Artistic Director James Newman’s annual audition process, which sends him traveling to colleges all over the country.

From best schools

“The cool thing about this company is they bring in people from the University of Michigan, the University of Oklahoma, ACT (American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco) - literally the best schools you could possibly go to in this country to pursue this career,” said Stewart, a recent graduate of the Pacific Conservatory of Performing Arts in Santa Maria.

“These are the people who are going to go on and do great things,” he said. “It’s incredibly humbling, and I’ve learned that I’ve got what it takes to perform next to these people.”

Styles added, “It has given us the opportunity to do some incredible roles in a professional setting.”

Even audiences that have seen the actors in several roles during the season will see a new side of them Saturday night at SRT’s annual cabaret show, with the actors appearing as themselves in a series of song and dance numbers.

“This is the fourth year doing our cabaret show. It gives our audiences another glimpse into the lives of our actors,” Newman said. “The idea is to showcase their talents in a way that maybe they haven’t had a chance to show. The actors get to choose things they enjoy.”

Said Styles, “I joked about doing a monologue for the cabaret, but I’ve been getting more serious as the days go by.”

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at 707-521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @danarts.