“She’s my right hand,” Drama Club Advisor Kayleigh Steinmetz said of Dakota Derks winning the Outstanding Senior Drama Club Member award prior to The Jungle Book showing last week. “She makes sure everything’s remembered.”

With a cast of 40 plus two sound crew members and playing to a packed house Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday of last week, Disney’s ‘The Jungle Book’ musical told the story of Mowgli (Seth Zastrow), an orphan boy raised by animals who decide it’s time for him to go to ‘the man village’ after tiger Shere Khan (Riley Weltzin) decides its time to take out the ‘man cub,’—that is, Mowgli.

“Shere Khan hates man,” Bagherra the Panther (Olivia Osvold) explains. “Man makes fire, and hunts tigers.”

With Mowgli slow to agree that it’s time to go, a cast of animal characters intervene, including elephant Colonel Hathi (Vaughn Schneider) and troop, Kaa the Snake (Caroline Johnson), Louie king of the Monkeys (Titus Kelly), and Baloo (Gunnar Goettl), though Baloo at first sides with Mowgli.

“They’ll ruin him,” Baloo says of sending Mowgli to the man village. “They’ll make him a man.”

With Shere Khan intervening to make everyone change their mind, the animals decide to stand up to the neighborhood bully, keeping the tiger from harming Mowgli. With things looking up for Mowgli’s presence in the jungle, he ends up deciding to go to the man village. A girl named Shanti (Grace Schmidt) who goes to the jungle for adventure, factors into this decision.

“You’re from the man village?” Mowgli asks her, suddenly reconsidering his aversion to leaving the jungle. With the animals saying they can return anytime, Mowgli and Shanti head off to the man village. Mowgli (Seth Zastrow) summed up his take on things after the show.

“I think he realized that he like it there, and wanted to stay there, but knows he can always come back to the jungle anytime he wants,” Zastrow said of what happens to Mowgli after he leaves the jungle for the man village.