Micah Meloy: Up-and-Coming Drama Star

With the production of CHS’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare nearing its end, it’s important to recognize the most essential part of our plays and musicals: the actors. It goes without saying that the actors in our drama department put in a lot of time and effort for their roles. One of them is freshman Micah Meloy.

Meloy is a newcomer to CHS drama, with A Midsummer Night’s Dream being his first experience with a CHS production. However, he already shows he’ll have a great future in stage performance at Cashmere. 

Although he’s never performed with Cashmere before, Meloy has had an extensive history as an actor with “Stage Kids” in Sunnyslope. He played minor roles in Mary Poppins, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Coach Bolton in High School Musical, and, his most significant role, Jafar in Aladdin. These helped Meloy gain the experience and skill he needed to take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Meloy, despite being new to CHS drama, is playing the co-leading role of Demetrius in the upcoming play. Meloy had a lot of preparation for his role as Demetrius, listening to an audio screenplay of the original Shakespearean A Midsummer Night’s Dream, watching the 1999 film adaptation of the play, and, of course, reading the script for CHS’s version of the play. The ‘90s  film in particular features legendary Hollywood actor Christian Bale as Demetrius, who Meloy said helped influence his portrayal of the character. 

“He did great in that role.” Meloy says, “He’s very mean…he’s like, kinda serious, as Christian Bale is, you know.”

One challenging part of his role for him is his kissing scene, although it’s just on a hand. “Not too bad [comparatively].” He says. “I don’t have the worst of it.” Another would be his sword-fighting scene with Trip Martin as Lysander, which lasts for around 3 minutes.

“It’s pretty difficult,” Meloy says, “because you don’t want to have hesitation when you’re trying to remember the next move you’re supposed to do.”

The version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that CHS drama is performing is very close to the original 15th century play, and thus, the dialogue is fairly complicated. However, Meloy didn’t struggle significantly with memorizing his lines.

“We (the play cast) had specific ‘memorization days’ at Mrs Gubsch’s house,” Meloy said. “We’d literally look over our lines [and then] take the script away. Different people have different methods of doing it, but I would read them until I knew them.” When asked about whether most of his time learning lines was on memorization days, he said, “For me, yes.” Meloy’s talent with memorizing lines is a testament to his skills and experience on stage.

When a midsummer night’s dream wraps up, Micah Meloy will continue. He plans to perform in any future CHS drama performances he can, including Once Upon a Mattress this winter. When asked about what his goals for his upcoming roles are, he simply said, “To give a good performance.”