During their only dress rehearsal when the cyc projection screen was pulled up, Tech Theatre students ran to pull the castle pieces out of the stage. When the cyc was pulled down, they rushed to bring the pieces back onto the stage. As they ran in and out of the stage, they yell out which direction they were going and soon found their own pathways.
Because of the four snow days, the Tech Theatre Magnet had limited time to complete the sets, props and costumes for “Frozen” musical before opening night on January 30.
As soon as they came back to school on Friday, freshman Isabella Ruiz said they all rushed and crammed everything in before the opening show that night. That day, she said they were all scared and didn’t know if they were going to get the show done in time.
“We all knew that we lost those days and that it was going to be stressful,” Ruiz said.
Ruiz said everyone mostly worked on painting the set pieces which took a lot of time since they had to wait to for each layer to dry. She said it was tedious because they have to paint one big base layer before painting all the details and filling in the blank space. Some pieces like the castle took hours to dry while the smaller pieces only took one hour.
Rai Howell said the snow lost them time to make and organize the props backstage, like the Ice Monster. They had to scrap pieces of the Ice Monster to finish it on time, which caused the monster’s run-through to be an hour before opening night. However, she said the Ice Monster still turned out good.
Howell said this experience helped her gain a lot of strength in prop designing.
Amy Watson said the snow days made them work a lot faster. Over the weekend, they took a lot of the costumes home to get them ready for the show. She said if they hadn’t done that, they wouldn’t have been able to get everything done.
“I think the snow made everyone feel a lot of panic and made people feel rushed,” Watson said. “I feel like it helped us focus more because we were on more of a crunched timeline.”
Watson said despite the time constraint, she didn’t think the costume looked any better or any worse without the show days.
During the show, the crew watched backstage and got to see the entire set coming together from the pieces they made. Ruiz said it was a good memory because everything fell into place.
“When we finally got to watch the show, it was like, ‘Wow, this is what we did,” Ruiz said.
Watson said she learned that they need to have their shows in better shape before opening, because they all rely on that week of rehearsal. She said from now on, they will know to be more prepared.
“I think for the next shows, we’re all going to remember how hard we had to work over the freeze and we’ll have our shows more ready before the show week,” Watson said.
