SEBASTIAN — Long-legged and full-throated, Chloe Larabie gave it her all in one last rehearsal, skittering across the stage of Riverside Children’s Theatre with all the charisma of a claw-waving fiddler crab corralling comrades across the sand.
The next morning, she was out the door of her Sebastian home at 4 a.m. By five, she was heading to Atlanta for the national Junior Theater Festival with 46 other Riverside kids, converging on Atlanta by midday along with 3,500 budding actors.
Arriving at midday, many still in their pajamas – including Chloe, the thousands swarmed into the lobby of the conference center hotel.
When it all wrapped up Sunday, Chloe and her stage mates from Riverside had won an award for Outstanding Music, and six, including Chloe, were selected to audition for a DVD of a new children’s play to be included with the script at distribution.
Playing Sebastian the crab, the character who sings the show-stopper song, “Under the Sea” in Disney’s “The Little Mermaid, Jr.” the singing, dancing 11-year-old from Storm Grove Middle School wowed her Riverside audience in December when the children’s theater staged the kid’s version of the musical.
Last week, she wowed a panel of judges in Atlanta with a condensed version of the show. Along with a charming and highly disciplined cast of kids, she made the most of Riverside’s 15 minutes of fame – the maximum length allowed for the presentation.
A shimmy, a two-step, a second-position stance and up went Larabie, nimbly popping onto the shoulders of a cast member without missing a beat of her non-stop number.
Chloe, the daughter of hair salon owner Roxy Larabie, is a relative newcomer to theater.
She tried out for a part in a play after one her mother’s clients, Danielle Beckmann, heard of how much she loved to sing and dance. Beckmann is the mother of Taylor Beckmann, who starred in “Rapunzel” at Riverside last year and was in the ensemble of “Little Mermaid.”
“If she auditions and she gets a part in a play, she gets this incredible experience and it costs nothing,” Danielle Beckmann told Roxy Larabie.
Chloe’s first audition was for Roald Dahl’s “The Twits.” She got a part as a monkey.
Prior to that, her only experience – beyond cheerleading – was a talent show at school.
“When I was in third grade, I decided to sign up for the school talent show at Pelican Island Elementary. I didn’t know that I was, like, a good singer,” she says. “I was nervous because I wasn’t used to performing yet. But I really wanted to sing a song for the show.”
The song she chose was Taylor Swift’s “Love Story.”
Before long, she wasn’t nervous anymore.
Her mother enrolled her in dance classes at Vero’s Dance Space on Miracle Mile. Today, she takes four classes a week – jazz, tap and two in ballet.
Last summer, she had an extraordinary experience: she went to New York to help develop a new children’s version of “James and the Giant Peach” by a theater publishing company.
She was chosen at last year’s Atlanta festival, along with Kristi Beckett, who is playing the young Cosette in Riverside’s “Les Misérables.”
For a week, Chloe stayed in New York in an apartment with her mom, heading out for a Broadway studio every morning. There she, Kristi and other kids “workshopped” the new play, reading the script and taking direction on stage, then providing the script’s publishers with feedback.
“It helps them a lot with the characters,” says Chloe. “We had lines and we sang, and if there was something we wanted to change, we’d say, ‘I don’t like this part in the script,’ and they might change it, and we’d try it again a new way.”
Her forays to New York and Atlanta have turned out to be the start of a network of fellow child actors around the country, as Chloe dips a toe in the theater world.
“I made a lot of friends in Atlanta last year and some of them were in New York,” Chloe says.
This year, her mom says, they ran into even more people they knew, including families they had seen in New York last summer. Chloe has stayed in touch with other budding actors on Facebook as well.
“I don’t know how to explain how excited I am to go to Atlanta again this year,” she said the night before the trip.
She was not disappointed.
“They got to meet all these Broadway professionals with incredible resumés. It’s definitely inspiring to the children,” says Roxy Larabie. “All of a sudden these famous people have a physical presence, and they’re telling their story person-to-person. It makes them more real and it makes the kids’ dreams more real. It’s a very big morale booster for the children.”
The RCT group’s performance was assessed by a panel of judges who critiqued the show with the children afterwards.
Then the group watched a half-dozen other groups perform, and went to lectures and workshops by Broadway, film and TV professionals.
“Our adjudicator said our music director, Debbie Quillinan, did an outstanding job and that our harmony was ‘superb,’ says Roxy Larabie. “That is a real tribute to Debbie’s teaching.”
Meanwhile, Chloe is preparing for her ensemble role at the Vero Beach Theatre Guild in “Disney’s Beauty and the Beast,” opening in March.
“She’ll be playing an Enchanted Object, a Sausage Curl Girl, and one of the forks,” says Roxy Larabie.
