Student Blog: From Waa-Zoom to the Waa-Movie, a new-work tradition takes on two pandemic years

The Waa-Mu Show has been called "the greatest college show in America" by the Associated Press. It's one of the largest Northwestern Theatre projects of the year, during which over a hundred students work to create and produce a brand new musical from the ground up under the mentorship of professionals. As a huge fan of new work, it's a project I've loved since freshman year, when I helped workshop and promote the show. As a sophomore, I served as artistic director of that freshman workshop cast/performance ensemble (called "Waa-2"), and was looking forward to joining the cast of that year's full production. But weeks before rehearsals were set to begin, the pandemic scattered the Waa-Mu team to their homes across the country. Now over a year and two full Waa-Mu shows (and more) later, this new-musical tradition has generated an array of different creative displays of musical theatre prevailing safely even in difficult circumstances.

In late March/early April 2020, the first weeks of the pandemic, virtual theatre was barely yet a thought. So I was caught by surprise with the news that the 2020 Waa-Mu show would not be cancelled but would be moving to a virtual format. After several weeks of development, rehearsal, and workshopping over zoom, the production culminated in a public zoom reading, featuring real-time performances and a combination of live and recorded singing. One of Northwestern's first forays into pandemic theatre, the early-May-2020 performance of that year's musical (State of the Art, occasionally nicknamed Waa-Zoom) represented an exciting moment of hope and community.

Next, my role as artistic director of Waa-2 led me to make my producing debut mid-pandemic. For much of the year, while performing a few songs at a time for various promotional gigs and developmental workshops, the group had tossed around the idea of producing their own full cabaret, a "Waa-2 Show". As we all sat in our homes in lockdown, bringing that project to life seemed like the perfect way to offer this ensemble performance opportunities in a quarter in which they would normally be performing live at a variety of gigs promoting the show. So, as the Waa-Mu show proper wrapped up, the Waa-2 show kicked into gear, claiming the title "Waa-Zoom" as its own (and marketing with some fun "Waa-2oom" graphics). As primarily a performer, choreographer, and teaching artist, I had never produced anything before, but here I was just a few months into the pandemic trying to figure out how to produce a virtual cabaret that could include solos performed live and duets and group numbers recorded previously and edited together. Some research and discovery later, I was learning how to navigate Streamyard (a platform many of us have likely become familiar with in a year of lots of creative live-streaming). Along with my co-directors and our ensemble, we assembled a set list of songs from previous Waa-Mu shows along with other musical theatre favorites and assigned them to various ensemble members, performing live on StreamYard in late May in a concert raising money for BCEFA's Covid-19 Emergency Assistance Fund and various Black Lives Matter organizations. Sharing the work of this ensemble community I'd been lucky enough to lead through an eventful year became one of my proudest (especially pandemic) accomplishments.

Although my Waa-2 involvement carried briefly into the fall of my junior year, when my co-directors and I guided the transition to the next year's leadership and ensemble, I focused on other theatre projects until I was cast in this year's Waa-Mu show at the end of the Winter. Due to uncertainty around what this second pandemic spring would bring, this year's Waa-Mu - The Secret of Camp Elliott -- would again be largely virtual. However, it would take a very different form than The State of The Art. Rather than a semi-live Zoom performance, The Secret of Camp Elliott would be a carefully edited movie musical. The music portion of the process was fairly standard for pandemic musical theatre- music was taught over zoom, and individuals sent in audio recordings of their parts to be edited together. However, the visuals were a little more complicated. The director complied a careful shot list for each scene and song, of exactly what she needed from each individual, to be shot individually in their own homes or outdoors. In zoom rehearsals, the storytelling/acting beats of each scene, along with instructions for shots, were discussed. Next, after some rehearsal, the zoom meeting was recorded as the actors read through the scene together. This audio track would be sent to actors to be played in Bluetooth earbuds and acted with as they filmed their shots of each scene individually. Dance numbers, taught over zoom, took shape via a similar process.

This made for a very unique opening night. Usually, one knows one's own show very well, having been immersed in it daily, by the time you share it with audiences. But with this year's Waa-Mu show, our only familiarity with performances of scenes and song we were not in was perhaps from the first early read-thru. So, about a month after shooting wrapped, the cast was in for an incredible surprise, seeing the work other brilliant teams had masterminded to beautifully edit together our material, even adding the music of a full orchestra, into fantastically joyful film. Often, it was possible to forget altogether that actors were acting only with a recording of their scene partner in their ear, not in a space together. Over a year of work and innovation in covid-safe musical theatre had culminated in a beautiful product.

Hopefully by next spring, The Waa-Mu Show will have returned to its traditional home in Northwestern's Cahn Auditorium for a live performance. But these two years of pandemic interruption will have been far from a waste: instead, they have represented an incredible showcase of the continued ingenuity and determination of Northwestern's student theatremakers of every discipline, and we can only imagine the theatrical innovations those qualities will create in the world of post-pandemic theatre.

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