Matt Windman

Theatre critic Matt Windman returns to French Woods Festival of the Performing Arts to check out a Side By Side concert, conducted by Jason Robert Brown. He writes about his experience!

Two years ago, I revisited French Woods Festival of the Arts (which I attended from 1999 to 2002 as a camper/teen actor and then as an assistant director/stage manager) and BroadwayWorld kindly published an article I wrote about the experience. In light of my responsibilities at work (attorney by day, theater critic by night) and at home (including a hyperactive toddler and commuting daily between NY and NJ), I was not planning on visiting again this past summer, but that instantly changed when I learned that the camp was planning on presenting 1776 for the first time in nearly two decades - and with an all-female cast.

How do you take hundreds of kids (ages 7 to 17) and put up over a dozen shows (mostly musicals, plus a few plays) in as little as three weeks, with rehearsals limited to maybe just 12 or 13 days, with all or most of the cast rehearsing just slightly more than two hours each day, and many campers working on multiple shows at once? And I'm talking about completely staged shows with full production values, including sets, lighting, sound, costumes and live orchestras. Not only that, imagine repeating this same frenzied process four times over the course of a single summer.