“James and the Giant Peach” cast rehearsing their prologue number.

Cast and crew

The Panorama Drama Department is taking a bite out of life with their fall musical “James and the Giant Peach.”

Based on the children’s novel by Roald Dahl, the story focuses on an English orphan boy who enters a giant magical peach and has a surreal ocean-trekking adventure with several anthropomorphic bugs. Junior Ruby Hummel is portraying the Ladybug character, and she describes how it’s been for most of the cast to transform into these roles, “It’s been kind of cool seeing like what characteristics match up with the different bugs like Ladybug and Grasshopper both are pretty proper and stuff and that’s just kind of like if you would think of those bugs it’s kind of how you would think of them.”

Junior Jordan Brown plays Aunt Sponge, and she says this is a family-friendly show that both kids and adults will enjoy, “And we worked really, really hard and it’s very nice when we have a full auditorium because it just makes us feel like ‘This is why we work so hard to impress all these people.”

Performances for “James and the Giant Peach” will be at 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday and at 2 p.m. Sunday in the high school auditorium in Panora. Tickets are $3 for students and $5 for adults.