Arts & Culture
Dreaming big: AATAT to debut Dreamgirls
The African American Theater Arts Troupe will present Dreamgirls for its winter show.
Dreamgirls runs from February 20–March 1, 2026.
UC Santa Cruz theater professor Don Williams did his best to hide from his students and their demands. But he wasn’t successful.
“I’ve been trying to run from my students for several years, and I tell you last year I had a group of students that was relentless, and every time we took a break, they would bring out the boom box and get to singing,” he said. “‘We’re trying to tell you something, Mr. Williams. We can sing and we want to do a musical.’”
That’s how it evolved that the African American Theater Arts Troupe (AATAT), which Williams founded in 1991, is presenting Dreamgirls February 20–March 1, 2026 for its winter show.
Williams started by doing a musical workshop with a trained singer to lead it.
“I said, ‘I’m going to bring someone in who can really sing because that’s not my forte,’” he said. “I do okay in a gospel choir, clapping my hands and saying, ‘Amen.’ My wife tells me, ‘You just make sure you sing low.’”
There are many challenges in producing Dreamgirls, the musical that premiered on Broadway in 1981 and was made into a movie in 2006, about a trio of singers, the Dreamettes, loosely based on The Supremes. Along with all the technicians and backstage crew, there’s a cast of 20, and dozens of costume and wig changes.
“It has a lot of layers to it, and there’s a show within a show,” Williams said. “Then there’s the layer of dance moves where you’ve got to dance and you’ve got to sing.”
That’s something undergraduate student Saleh Hyson, who plays the character Deena Jones, based on Diana Ross, has been working on.
“I think I’m in pretty good shape, and I can sing, and I can dance, but put those two together, and it is difficult,” Hyson said. “Our cast, sometimes on Fridays, will go to the East Field and we’ll run laps around the track and sing while we’re running.”
The cast rehearses five days a week, and on the days they don’t rehearse, Hyson, a fourth-year environmental studies major with a Black studies minor, gets together with her fellow Dreamettes to practice and run lines.
“It definitely is a lot of work, but that’s part of the fun. All of us want this production to be successful and beautiful, to bring people joy and share the story,” she said. “It creates this beautiful community of artistic Black creatives who just want to put on a good show.”
Stage manager Isabella Lau, a theater major, also enjoys the challenge of working on Dreamgirls, her first musical, and shepherding a production from the beginning to the end.
“I like the fact that I get to watch the entire process from when there was nothing to when there are lights and sound, and it’s really fun to see,” she said. “I can go through my camera roll and be like, ‘This is where we started, and this is how we end up.’”
Williams is impressed by the students’ hard work and their determination to master the material. He says them getting together outside of rehearsal lets him know how excited they are.
“It’s a challenge for them, and they’re like, ‘I want to be victorious over this,’” he said. “They’re thinking, ‘I’m going to work extra hard on my dance moves that I have to do because it’s not just me, but I have to work with the team, and we have to step together.”
AATAT will also go to high schools in Monterey and Santa Cruz to present excerpts from the play and to talk about the troupe.
“We’re doing the outreach and trying to inform these young adults that theater is great. Theater is wonderful,” Williams said. “It helps you connect the dots of how to speak and how to embrace people and how to challenge yourself.”
The African American Theater Arts Troupe, the only one of its kind in the UC system, promotes the work of Black artists and playwrights and is open to all students of all backgrounds. Williams says it allows them to present authentic stories, and students have told him it’s why they chose to go to UC Santa Cruz.
“I had the opportunity to direct more than five of August Wilson’s plays,” Williams said. “He’s what I call a true historian of African American people.”
Hyson did musical theater in middle school, and last year she stage managed Dominique Moriseau’s Paradise Blue, set in 1949 Detroit. She says she loves the troupe and getting to work with Williams.
“Every now and then I have to remind myself, and I’m like, ‘Guys, we are in the presence of a legend.’ You don’t understand what this man has done.”