by Isabella Fishbough
The Drama Club has been having a lot of things going on during the past couple weeks, and it hasn’t even been a full semester! They’ve had casting for their fall show, The Crucible, and the one-act, Still Life with Iris, as well as rehearsals for both shows. They’ve also had to plan several Drama Club meetings, an improv show, and a field trip for the entire Drama Club to see the musical Newsies. Not to mention, creating and sewing costumes, as well as building sets for both shows. Here is what’s happening in the Drama Department of Freedom High.
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Improvmania!
On Friday September 29, 2017, the Drama Club had their first improv show of the school year. The theme of this Improvmania show was “Popstars vs Rappers” and there were many recognizable faces. Some pop stars that the cast chose to play were Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, Brendon Urie, Taylor Swift, Sia and so on. The rappers that they chose were Lil Pump, Nicki Minaj, Cardi B, 21 Savage, and many others.
Throughout the show, the cast played several Improv games like DVR, Dance Teacher, and First Line Last Line. In one of the performances of DVR, there was a smack-down with George Washington that was one for the history books. In the game Dance Teacher, Britney Spears and Theodore –from Alvin and the Chipmunks– taught us some of their favorite dance moves. Britney even showed off her famous moves from her single “Hit Me Baby One More Time.” During a game of First Line Last Line, Faiq and Eddie shared a kiss that had everyone out of their seats dying of laughter.
As a final performance, the cast had groups where they had to act like the celebrity character that they all dressed up as. Apparently, Brendon Urie likes to date a lot of women… Britney Spears, Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, and Shakira were all tricked to believe they were his “girlfriends.” There was sure to be a ‘death of a bachelor’ soon.
The show also had a Pie in the Face fundraiser which raised over $100, and resulted with Mrs. Probst only having 23 tickets in her jar while Mr Nash-Brown had 88 in his. The lucky winner, Sebastian Lopez, was able to slam that pie in Mr Nash-Brown’s face after only being in his Theatre 1 class for less than a month! Apparently he had bought 20 tickets and put them all in Mr Nash-Brown’s jar; seems as if he was pretty dedicated to pie Mr Nash-Brown in the face.
Newsies!
On October 5, the drama department so graciously decided to take their classes to go see the musical Newsies at the Orlando Repertory Theater. Eight buses had to take over 300 students, and that’s not even counting the chaperones. As we entered the theater, we had to walk across the stage in order to get to our seats because the theater was set in a thrust. A thrust is a theater that has the stage where the audience is on three sides, and the stage wasn’t elevated in this case. Since there were two sections of seating on either side, people were able to see the performance from a different perspective other than just the front.
Once the show began, the songs, costumes, scenery, set design, and lights were on and ready to be seen on stage. The cast had embraced New Yorker accents and the slang they used during 1899. The musical Newsies is about the Newsboys’ Strike of 1899, and tells the story of Jack Kelly and how he led his friends–the Newsies–to be involved in the strike after the prices to sell newspapers were raised. Jack Kelly goes through this journey of trying to find a way to get the newspaper to lower the prices, and in doing this he has to get every newsboy involved in this strike to prove a point to the newspapers.
The youngest members of the cast were 13 and 15 years old, but danced almost like professionals. The cast had done some of the cleanest set changes I have ever seen, and some changes even were during the scenes. During parts of the show, the cast was up on the staircases performing, or in little platforms that were on either side of the center seats. The set was designed to look as if it were the fire escape off the side of cheap New York apartments. One section of the staircase was detachable to go in the middle of the stage, so the audience was able to see the actors better if they were performing on it. The stage itself was decorated with sewage covers and bricks to look like the streets of New York; it also had a faint overlay of some newspaper articles.
Overall, the show was very enjoyable, and the crowd loved it too. One of the drama club members, Rebecca Sardina, that went along for the trip has said, “It was one of the best musicals I have ever seen. Especially the little details, like the costumes, props, and makeup.” Most of the theatre students had only good things to say about the performance and the actors. On the way back, some students were singing the songs on the bus. That just goes to show how good the performance was and how talented the actors were.