A new director will be overseeing Knoxville High School’s spring musical, and she’s raising the bar for the students who want to work on the show.

“Little Shop of Horrors” will be this year’s production; Heidi Feldman will be this year’s producer, and students trying out for the show will face a new and tougher set of restrictions. So to help them along with the process, Feldman will be hosting preliminary workshops before the actual auditions.

She will be available at the school on Saturday from 10 a.m. until noon, to help students choose a monologue and a short song to perform; then on Saturday, November 10th she will hold mock auditions for every student trying out for a part. Auditionees will be critiqued on their performance, but no decisions will be made then.

Feldman tells KNIA/KRLS News these rules are stricter because the ones they could face at the college level or higher are also stricter; so to better prepare them, she’s forcing students to step up their game.

“I just want to give them an opportunity to kind of run through things since I’m doing things a little bit differently than has been done in the past,” Feldman says.

“I’m running the auditions a little bit more like a college would be, if they were to be auditioning for a show at a college or to be auditioning for a musical theater program or a theater program in a college setting. These are the kinds of restrictions and the kinds of things that they will be doing.”

Students will audition for real on Monday, November 19th, with callbacks the following evening. “Little Shop of Horrors” will be performed at the Knoxville Performing Arts Center from March 1st through 3rd.