November 26, 2013 at 4:09 p.m.
'Pirates of Penzance' a wonderful learning experience for drama students
'Pirates of Penzance' a wonderful learning experience for drama students
By By Kristin Larsen-
This job is much easier, however, when the play isn't a musical. To put together a musical, I need to enlist the help of many other experts -- a choral director, a choreographer, a pit band director, and a pianist. We're so lucky to have talented, enthusiastic experts who are willing to put in long hours and work for very little pay to teach the kids how to put on the best musical show they can. Connie Piasecki and the pit band have been working since the beginning of the school year rehearsing their parts and coming to our rehearsals 4 days a week for the last three weeks. Mary Peterson joined the pit band and was the pianist. She accompanied the kids through every song (and "Pirates of Penzance" had a lot of songs...28 to be exact!) Lora-Jean Jones was the choreographer. She spent many, many hours teaching the kids the precise dance moves they needed to learn. Desiree Wattelet was the Choral Director Extraordinaire, and has been for our last three musicals. She has patience with students when mine is gone. She is positive, energetic, amazingly talented and can get the most beautiful sounds from kids. Without her, this play wouldn't have been anywhere near as good as it was.
When my team and I start a drama season, I start looking for musicals and plays that are first and foremost, interesting to me. I'm not a fan of chestnuts or overly familiar titles and I look for plays that are newer, not too mainstream, and surprising to the audience. Then, we think about the students who we know are going to be auditioning and which plays have roles for those students. Next, we think about the difficulty of the material. ("Pirates of Penzance" is the exception to that. I thought, "This is mostly music, it's going to be easy...WRONG." It was really difficult material and the kids really rocked it, in spite of the difficulty.) Lastly, we have to consider the royalties and rental fees. We have to rent scripts for musicals and pay royalties for all the plays we do. Newer or more popular plays usually have more expensive royalties. As our budget continues to dwindle, we have to be more and more conscious of finding plays with less costly royalties.
After we choose the plays, we plan the general calendar for the year. This process is much more difficult when we have to work with the schedules of all the experts for the musical and the students who are involved in multiple activities and have jobs and other obligations. We spend a lot of time discussing and changing the schedule and reminding students of the changes and sometimes we even have the whole cast together at once!
We held auditions for "Pirates of Penzance" during the second week of school and had three rehearsals per week until November when we started rehearsing four days a week. We got to tech week, which was the entire week prior to opening night, Nov. 21. The purpose of tech week is to get the lights, sounds, props, set changes, costumes, make-up, and all other "technical" things sorted out. Tech week for "Pirates" was amazingly smooth. In fact, the technical things worked out even better than some of the things happening on stage! However, the kids really pulled it together and we had a great first performance. By the time this article runs, the play will be finished. The set will be taken down, the costumes will be hung back up, the props will be put away, and the stage will be swept and clean, but the notes of the wonderful student voices will still be echoing somewhere in the rafters of the auditorium. I feel lucky to be able to work with such talented students and adults and am very proud of our productions. We perform two plays a year.
Watch for the announcement of the dates for the spring performances. We welcome the public to join us in celebrating the dramatic arts in our community!
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