When children audition for CenterStage’s next production, they’ll find the experience to be a little more intimate than it’s been for past plays — even though the sprawling musical, “Madagascar: A Musical Adventure Jr.,” is anything but quiet.

CenterStage, the Youth Division of the Meridian Little Theatre, will be holding auditions for the play at 6 p.m. on July 31 for children ranging from kindergarten through 12th grade, and this time around the auditions will be closed, without friends or family or other performers in the room.

“It’s more Broadway,” said Sidney Covington, CenterStage director, describing the closed auditions. “It’s the way it’s done in the national theaters, and we want to educate our public and our children.”

The play is scheduled to be performed from Jan. 8 through Jan. 12, 2018.

Ellie Massey, executive / artistic director of the Meridian Little Theatre, said the arrangement also helps the evaluators to glean a sharper impression of the children’s performance.

“You get a better sense of what their creativity is if it’s just them, and they’re coming up with something in the middle of auditions,” Massey said.

Massey and Covington described a two-step process to the coming auditions. Children will be asked some questions about themselves — and some may be asked to sing a portion of a song they know — in one room, and then in another room children will be asked to perform dance moves that they’re taught at the audition. It’s part of a stage of growth, in the Meridian Children Theatre’s children’s division, which Massey and Covington say signals a more challenging and exciting mode of theater.

Covington said “Madagascar: A Musical Adventure Jr.” is likely to challenge children more than past plays might have. It’s a DreamWorks production and a full-fledged musical, she explained, with parts that require combinations of acting, singing and dancing. She said about 60 to 75 students will be cast.

But if Covington and Massey want the process to be rigorous, they also want it to reach deeply into the community. The timing of the audition is not accidental but, as Covington noted, “choreographed” with a strategy in mind. It’s taking place right after registration week for area schools. Massey said the outreach will cast a massive net, including students from the Meridian Public School District, the Lauderdale County School District, home schools and private schools.

“They’re going to get something to take home with them from registration,” Massey said, noting that she hopes the auditions cross many boundaries.

“Black, white, young, old, poor, affluent — it doesn’t matter,” Massey said.

“It is not a clique,” Covington added. “It is a community theater. We want more and more to come and try. And if they think it’s always the same people, banish that thought. Break that mold. Come in and try.”

Covington and Massey discussed the coming auditions in Covington’s home on a recent afternoon, and they emphasized the way education lies at the heart of the plays for children.

“We focus on the education portion of it,” she said.

But as Covington described it, that sort of education doesn’t necessarily involve advice administered dispensed from above. She said she wants to spark children to think, and to envision worlds outside of their own — to imagine what it’s like to be someone else, and even what it’s like to feel someone else’s pain.

“We just try to get them to get into the mind of the audience member,” she added.

On Thursday morning at the Meridian Little Theatre, that sort of educational approach was in action. Children were rehearsing for the CenterStage Workshop, held each summer, which this year features a play written by Massey called “The Internet Has Crashed.” It’s slated to be performed at noon on Friday, July 14, and it’s free and open to the public.

Massey, Covington and a number of other adults were helping to prepare students for the production on Thursday.

“You’ve got a secret with the audience,” Massey told one performer, coaxing him to develop that rapport as he addressed the audience.

Covington noted that CenterStage has a strong working relationship with Stage 2, the teen-focused theater group in Meridian. She said a number of young performers with CenterStage “graduate” into Stage 2.

“They can go there for more advanced performances, and they can also come here, too, when our plays call for older kids,” she said.

Stage 2 Member Kaitlyn Clayton, 15, understands the synergy that can surface between the older and the younger children who perform. Kaitlyn, who began acting in the third grade with CenterStage, was helping out at Thursday’s rehearsal.

“We talk and give advice,” Kaitlyn said of the older children, “especially to the younger kids who haven’t done much of it.”

Ellanor Coleman, 11, said her greatest nervousness struck while she was backstage before her first performance, and then once she emerged onstage — drenched in lights and immersed in the action of the play — the jitters seemed to drain away.

“The first time I did it was backstage thinking, ‘Oh, I’m going to mess this up,’ but then once I was onstage I just loved it,” said Ellanor, who played the Dormouse in CenterStage’s production of Alice@Wonderland during the last school year.

Covington said the children also gain a kind of self-knowledge — and, as she put it, “intuitiveness about themselves.”

The actors say the process can also widen their whole sense of self.

“It encourages you to get out of your comfort zone,” Kaitlyn said.

“Especially,” Ellanor added, “if you have a silly part.”