by Isabella Fishbough
James and the Giant Peach is this year’s spring musical brought to you by Freedom’s Performing Arts. Many months of casting, preparing, building, rehearsing, and creating go into making Freedom’s musicals a possibility. The entire process is tiring for not only the cast, but the crew as well. This year the tech crew started early on creating this show for it to be as magical as possible. To learn more about what goes on behind the scenes, I interviewed the heads of the theatre departments to have a more in depth understanding.
For this specific show, Mr. Nash-Brown wants it to be as if it came out of the pages from a pop-up children’s storybook. Mrs. Probst is the one who oversees the tech crew to make sure Nash-Brown’s vision for this show is able to be brought to life. The process to design the massive peach that will be on stage has been in the works since this musical was announced last year.
The heads of the building crew are Eddie Goris and Sean Norman who are working to make both of the theatre teachers’ ideas a reality. Their crew for build has had so many tough sets to build. According to Goris, the hardest to build was the set for last school year’s one act Peter and the Starcatcher. “Not only did we have to build our own floor, but furthermore we made our makeshift ship that took up the entire stage and progressively got higher off the ground.” For James and the Giant Peach, Goris said that while they were in the creating and designing process for the peach, they continuously questioned themselves asking “how in the world are we gonna make a peach the size of the stage?” He also said that it “was definitely the hardest concept and design period I’ve ever experienced.”
The costumes department is not only responsible for costumes, but hair and makeup as well. Katia Bitar, Gaby Diaz, and Nicolle Salas are heads of this crew, which makes them in charge of the entire cast’s costumes and any quick changes.
The head of lights is Zach Assid who takes care of the overall visual aura of what scene is on stage, and makes sure the audience is able to see the actors’ and actresses’ faces.
Alex Roach is the head for sound crew, which makes him in charge of not only playing the tracks on time, but making sure the actors’ and actresses’ voices can be heard. Roach said that, “the hardest part about setting up the soundtrack is making the sound effects and making them sound perfect. We then need approval from our director before any of our sound effects are final for the shows. After we make them we get them on a USB and put them inside a playback program and play them at their certain cues that are set by us, stage management, or the directors.” When micing an actor, Roach said that it all depended on who the actor was, the show, and the mic. He also said that there were “some instances where we have to wait on the actors are them getting back from hair, makeup, and costumes then coming to us so we can properly mic them. The process of micing an actor should only take about at the very most 30 seconds; the longest part of it is the mic check where we see if their mic sounds good or not. This process takes anywhere from 15 seconds to 10 minutes depending on how good or bad the actors mic pack, lavalier, or levels are. Most of the time the levels are already saved on our board so we don’t have to spend as much time as we used to.” If there is ever a difficulty on stage, like if the mics were going to die, they would have “mic wranglers” constantly watching the battery levels of the actors to be able to switch out the batteries while they are offstage before going back on or to their next cue.
The props department is led by Anna Soto, which makes her in charge of whatever props are on stage and what the characters hold.
In this musical, Nell Warman is the head of puppets that will be used.
The drama department is working so hard to make this musical be as wonderful as possible. One of Mr. Nash-Brown goals is to make sure it keeps what every other show he has ever directed has been, which is to make sure it’s not a high school level production. If anyone has ever seen one of Freedom’s musicals or plays, then they could say first-hand it’s very professional. Come see James and the Giant Peach on one of the performance dates, April 9th, 10th, and the 12th through 14th.