Friday, April 19, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.
Adam Kaokept is simply awestruck.
Not long ago, the teen was sitting in a New York audience watching the Tony Award-winning musical "Passion," marveling at the operatic singing styles of one of the show's stars, Francis Ruivivar.
"He was just incredible," the Las Vegas Academy senior recalls.
These days, Adam and his classmates are sharing the stage with Ruivivar, a Broadway veteran ("Miss Saigon," "Starlight Express"), who is the guest star in the school's production of the biblical musical "Children of Eden."
The 5-year-old play, written by Tony-winning director John Caird, made its "high school world premiere" last night at the Academy and will run through next weekend.
Ruivivar is portraying Father, the show's god figure.
"I saw him just two years ago on Broadway," Adam says, "... and now I'm working side by side with him. That's incredible."
Wait, it gets better.
Also lending a hand: composer/lyricist Stephen Schwartz, who co-wrote the Academy Award-winning song "Colors of the Wind" from Disney's "Pocahontas."
Schwartz also penned the "Eden" score and worked with academy students during recent rehearsals to perfect the show's "world music"-style arrangements -- all 40 of them.
To top it all off, Schwartz and Caird are slated to attend tonight's performance.
Give credit for the celebrity-packed production to the show's director, Glenn Edwards, head of the academy's drama department.
"I've just always believed that, in the world of education, there's lots of people that can teach," he says. "The kids learn from everybody they work with."
While teaching in Indiana last year, Edwards began working with a play-publishing company to get "Eden" produced at the high school level. When he came to the academy, his goal followed.
"It's been a real labor of love," Edwards says.
The drama, based on the book of Genesis, modernizes the stories of the Garden of Eden and Noah's ark by focusing on parent-child conflicts.
"It takes these stories that we all know and really gives them a very nice tie-in to contemporary, modern society and the kind of things we all face with our families," Edwards says.
"The play is about parents coming to (understand) the idea that children have to begin to make their own choices, make their own decisions and you hope that they go in the right direction, but you really don't have a lot of control over that."
Adam, an academy theater student, drew off his own adolescent angst for his roles: Adam and Eve's son Cain, and Noah's son, Japheth.
"Just being a teenager, you're with your parents and you're at a stage where you want to go off and live life on your own," he says.
"That's exactly where Cain is. He's becoming an adult and someone who wants to find his own self and explore the world instead of following everything that his parents want."
Same goes for Eve, says Lyndsey Hudgins, the sophomore portraying the first woman on Earth.
"I think she wants to obey Adam (played by junior Michael Foley) because she is his wife, and she also wants to obey her father (Ruivivar), who is God, but at the same time, she's got all of these things inside her, all of these questions," she says.
No wonder, then, "When I first read the show, I thought it was the perfect vehicle for high school students," Edwards says.
"But I felt that it would be very important that there would be some separation between the students and the father figure."
That's where Ruivivar comes in. A mutual friend of his and Edwards' turned him on to the production.
"I think it's great that (the students) have the opportunity to do a show of this scale. It'll be good for them," he says.
"What I find is refreshing is just to see their pure amazement and enchantedness with theater. They're so excited and gung-ho about everything. I feel like I'm giving back because they look up to you and it's always nice to pass on some advice.
"The kids are at different stages of development that I can tell already, just from rehearsals. Right now, I'm holding myself as like the glue that's keeping everything pieced together."
Ruivivar had to do some schedule juggling for this engagement, hopping red-eye flights between rehearsals to New York, where he lives and is recording the voices for a pair of yet untitled cartoons to air on TV this fall.
This summer, though, he and his wife ("up and coming" country singer/songwriter Cathryn Croft) will be moving to Las Vegas so that Ruivivar can pursue television and film work in Los Angeles -- without having to live too close to Los Angeles.
That's where Schwartz was during a recent phone interview. He was putting the finishing touches on the soundtrack to the upcoming Disney flick "The Hunchback of Notre Dame."
The composer first got in on the high school production of "Eden" last year with Edwards, who says, "We just sort of hit it off in terms of the ideas we had for it."
Though the play had seen success in prior regional and community theater productions, "It's not really commercial (and is) very difficult to produce," Schwartz says, citing the need for a cast of 49 players as a financial problem.
"Glenn has a national reputation for doing very impressive productions with secondary school students," he says, adding that the academy has "some very talented singers."
Could Schwartz be referring to Lyndsey? Singing since she was 5 years old, she says working with the composer was "amazing."
"He had me hit notes that I didn't think I ever could. He had me go beyond what I thought I could ever do."
Hope she can hold those notes awhile. The production is being considered for a performance/competition spot in the esteemed International Thespian Festival in Nebraska this summer.
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