Get ready to see poodle skirts, hear some upbeat tunes, and be transported back to the ‘50s in musical theatre’s production of “Grease” on January 22 and 23 at 7:30 in the auditorium.
While theatre fans typically direct their attention to the large school productions that are the fall plays and spring musicals, members of Running Dog Productions put a lot of work into their winter class performance as well. The winter production is a bit different when it comes to its preparation, though.
“So, for the fall and spring musicals, we have a lot of after school rehearsals and anybody can audition, but for ‘Grease,’ we prepare in musical theater class,” sophomore Ella Pendleton, playing head cheerleader Patty Simcox, said. “We basically create a full-scale musical within the class.”
While still full of the theater department’s best performances, the winter show is known to be a bit smaller of a production due to the limited number of students participating, and the class’s short time frame for practicing.
“[The winter show] is on a smaller scale because there’s not as much time to prepare everything,” senior and lead actress Mary Esther Vaughan said. “We usually do shorter shows; ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ last fall was three hours, while ‘Grease’ is only an hour and a half.”
The ‘Grease’ cast’s short window to prepare and time to master their lines, movements, and stage chemistry provides some stress to the actors come tech week. Therefore, musical theatre students put in the extra hours to make sure they truly know their part.
“I’m also the choreographer, so I have to do all the stuff outside of school because I don’t have time in class,” Pendleton said. “So our homework is preparing for the show.”
In the past, the winter show has been a stressful time for the musical theatre class and teacher, Ms. Marks, due to their shortened preparation time.
“For ‘Grease,’ unlike the other shows, [our preparation] is only 90 minutes every other day, so we have to be smart about how we plan things out,” Ms. Marks said. “Last year, when we did ‘Anything Goes,’ we actually had never run through the whole show all the way until we opened.”
This year, however, the actors are putting the work in by maximizing their preparation time outside of school to ensure that ‘Grease’ is a major wintertime success.
“We saw what happened last year of not running it beforehand, and I think we all really want it to be good,” Pendleton said. “I think that we need to be prioritizing it and try to focus on what we’re doing right now and not on what’s coming ahead.”
The cast’s strong work ethic is going to ensure that ‘Grease’ is remembered as one of musical theater’s best class productions. The actors are looking forward to singing and dancing their hearts away in one of the world’s most famous musicals.
“We’ve kind of done our own take on ‘Grease’ to make it really campy and really fun,” Ms. Marks said. “It never takes itself too seriously. We just want people to have a great time.”
