Student Blog: Year's Worth of Theatre

Hi, readers! In my previous blog post, I told you all a little bit about my plans for the next 3 months. For this post, I figured it’d make sense to let you know what’s been going on for the past 9.

I’m very privileged to go to a high school with a very strong arts program. We put on four different productions every school year, three of which are plays, and one of which is a musical. Each of these is different, too — let me explain.

Each year, the drama department starts by hosting a drama pre-season in late August, where those involved in the arts can gather for a day of fun and begin workshopping the show that’s planned for the fall. The fall production at our school is always a play. Sometimes a classic show will be selected (for example, 2020’s Twelfth Night or 2021’s Sense & Sensibility), and sometimes the show picked will be a contemporary piece, such as the show I performed in this year: Qui Nguyen’s She Kills Monsters. I played the role of Chuck, alongside performers and crew members from all four grades, and we performed the show for an audience a total of five times in early November of 2022.

The winter season, at least for the time I’ve been here, is always home to a contemporary musical. In past years, students have designed and performed in Urinetown, Cinderella, and The Theory of Relativity. This year’s chosen musical was The Wizard of Oz, and although I didn’t participate in it (I’m more of a play person), I thoroughly enjoyed watching my friends in it. A member of this year’s graduating class actually auditioned her dog for the part of Toto, and he was a hit!

The spring season is the most unique for our drama department, mainly because the two productions that take place in it are, for the most part, student-led. More specifically, these productions are senior-led: high-achieving, 12th grade drama students can elect to take a full-year honors class called “Senior Seminar in Drama”. The culminating project of this class is to collaborate on a play that you will later cast and direct high-school underclassmen in. The senior-written play last year was called Mine or Yours, and this year’s was called Rough Draft (it was about a group of wildly different personalities learning to work together to write a play – sounds familiar!). Alternatively, one or two of the students in the Senior Seminar class will choose to direct the middle school play, which is performed by a cast of 6th to 8th graders. The middle school play is usually something contemporary too, with past middle school plays being The Frankensteins Are Back In Town and The Adventures of Robin Hood. 

The spring season is a very well-designed program: faculty who work non-stop on the fall and winter productions take a step back as these two plays are put on, leaving room for soon-to-be graduates to develop true independence in the arts. 

The shows that our school decides to put on are usually announced near the end of the previous season, or, for the fall play, in late July or early August. Stay tuned to find out what this fall will bring!