PUBLIC SCHOOL PARTNERSHIP
building bridges to confidence
F
lashback to 2010: A tiny Oompa Loompa skips across the stage to talk to Willy Wonka. Her emerald green hair glimmers under the stage lights, contrasting sharply with her bright orange make-up and exaggerated white eyebrows. “Her enthusiasm was undeniable,” remarked Bill Jacob, Creative Arts Department Chair and director of Brimmer’s production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that year. That Oompa Loompa was Laura Lopez, a fourth grader at the Sumner School, a public elementary school in Roslindale, MA. Wearing baggy overalls and a big smile, she was performing onstage for the first time ever and thrilled to be pulling it off. It was Lopez’s first taste of theater, and she was determined
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Spring 2019
Brimmer Magazine
not to make it her last. “I told my mom,” she remembers. “When I go to high school, I’m going to Brimmer and May!” Fast-forward eight years, and Lopez is deep into a very busy senior year at Brimmer. Fresh from serving as co-stage manager of the Upper School’s production of Tom Jones she was already looking ahead to the spring musical, Newsies. Since enrolling at Brimmer in 9th grade, she has embraced everything the theater has to offer—performing in Candide and In the Heights and working behind the scenes co-stage managing Into the Woods and Alice in Wonderland—in addition to Tom Jones. With a heavy academic course-load,
as a member of the school’s curling and recreational tennis teams, and with a plan to pursue pre-med and political science studies at college next year, Lopez doesn’t plan to slow down anytime soon. “Laura has been a really valued member of our community since she arrived,” reflects Jacob, Lopez’s advisor for the last four years. “It has been marvelous to watch her confidence grow.”
This Page: Laura Lopez ’19 (second from left) performing in Brimmer’s 2016 production of “In the Heights” Opposite: Laura returned to Sumner with Bill Jacob this winter to visit Sumner Extended Day Director Jeanette Pizzaro
