Iowa’s best high school speech performers are gathering at the All-State Festival Saturday in Ames.

Pella Christian High School is sending their Musical Theatre group to Iowa State Center to perform their selection from The Scarlet Pimpernel. Performers Colin Stravers, Samuel Dahm, Thomas Dykstra, Tyler Egesdal, Parker Schnell, Jimmy Beyer, and Colby De Vries are the first performing act for Pella Christian at All-State in seven years.

Beyer tells KNIA/KRLS News that musical theatre is among the most challenging in competition due to vast differences between what they perform for judges compared to the intent of the source material.

“It’s really hard to have the costuems stripped away, to have the majority of the cast stripped away, to have a lot of the sets stripped away, to have a lot of the lines, songs–everything,” he says. “But with the bare minimum that we do have, we accomplish a very hard task which is to make the audience believe they are watching a full scale production.”

Hear more from the Pella Christian Musical Theatre group on today’s Let’s Talk Pella.