Bryan Haynes/The Gazette Director Jessica Dukes attempts to get a little more expression from Brandon Walls, 14, of Rockville, at the Colours program's rehearsal at Northwestern High School.

It's just two days before their first production of "Kids Today," a musical written by Colours Musical Theater Director Jessica Dukes, and the cast of 11 to 17-year olds is working out the glitches. As audio contraptions fly from the singers' necks, Colours Program Director Jason Cook discretely summons a student and demonstrates to him how to wear the headset and dance, simultaneously.

"We don't look for art kids," Cook said. "That's why we don't audition." Colours attempts to jumpstart children's interest in theater, dance and song.

"The arts saved my life," said Cook, an English teacher from Miami, Fla. When he was in trouble as a kid, it was a theater director who told him, "You can either be angry at life, or you can grow."

Clearly, Cook decided to grow. This year the Colours summer performing arts program moved from Riverdale Elementary to Northwestern High School. The program he founded almost a decade ago caters to kids ranging from 7 to 17 years old.

In charge of the Musical Theater department for the last three years, Dukes agrees with Cook that enriching the participants' lives is more important than creating stars. Dukes has been involved with the Colours program, which also teaches performing arts during the school year, since 1992.

This year's musical is about peer pressure, said Dukes, a 20-year-old theater student at Frostburg State University. She said the social environment of performance is particularly helpful to the shy and brainy kids who enter the program. "I think it opens them up," she said. "It gives them a chance to make new friends and get them out of their shells. Performing builds character."

Sharday Melton, a 15-year-old Eleanor Roosevelt High School student from Greenbelt, with a lead role in the musical, gushed about the program. Melton wants to be an actress or director. Next year, the two-year Colours veteran hopes to become counselor for the program, following a path that 80 percent of the Colours' staff, including Dukes, has taken. "Jessica is totally my role model," Melton said. "When I get to be her age, I want to be doing what she is doing."

Melton is on her way: She helps teach the younger kids to face the audience and project their voices.

Her character in the play, Lisa, is a middle school student with a crush on a schoolmate named Tye. Though the attraction is mutual, the two have a few hurdles to jump. "He keeps wanting to talk to her, but every time he tries there's an interruption, like the bell rings," she said. "It never works out because we realize that we're too young to be in a relationship."

Melton identifies with her character, she said, because she has also been infatuated. The play, she said, delivers a useful, message to her peer group. "A lot of junior high kids that I know get into relationships too early," she said.

While the Musical Theater program puts on one play, and involves kids older than 10, the Drama and Dance program assembles short skits and dance routines, and includes kids as young as 7.

Upstairs in a small classroom where Drama and Dance instruction is held, 10-year-old Nicholas Hainesworth practices his role as "Josh" in a two-man skit. The skit, Hainesworth said, is about two boys who form a union "because they think life is not fair." His character thinks his life is unjust because his older sister has more privileges. "She gets clothes, toys, dolls, and money," Hainesworth said, "for just being her."

Unlike in the musical theater, the drama performances are not exclusively counselor-written. These scripts are a collaboration between the staff and the campers. "They basically write their own show," said Bianca Williams, assistant director of the Drama Program. "We perfect and go over [what they've written], and that's what we perform."

Hainesworth and his partner, Nicholas McDowel, were not quite old enough to write their script. Still, said Hainesworth, "We found ways to make it better, like facial expression, [and] hand movement."

In addition to the summer program, Colours has a Traveling Troupe that performs throughout the county and in Pennsylvania and Florida.

Colours has also helped develop performing arts programs at Arrowhead, Carrollton, Paint Branch, and Templeton elementary schools.

While Cook said he has been asked to pilot his program in Montgomery County, he likes working in Prince George's. "There's not enough arts here, and there's not enough kids who believe that everybody's talented," he said.

Colours has gone a long way towards showing this summer's group of 140 kids that they have some level of talent.

Smiling like a proud father, Cook watched the "Kids Today" cast complete a dance routine. "These kids five weeks ago," he said, "didn't know their right arm from their left arm."