The Spring Musical - bringing back memories!

The weekend’s posts are fairly sparse because my two youngest sons’ musical went up on stage May 4-7. My seventh grader was asked to work stage crew with the high school cast because of his fine work with the middle school musical earlier this year, and my sophomore was the male lead in the production of Mary Poppins (the Dick Van Dyke character, Bert).

As a proud father, I’ll gladly tell you that it was a very credible performance, and that my son was one of the highlights of the show. (But as a proud father, I’ll also tell you that my youngest son’s curtain work was exemplary, too!)

As a music teacher of thirty years’ experience, one who put on his share of these productions over the years (and let the pit in a few others), I’ll echo that sentiment. The young man who’s taken over the local high school’s drama program, himself a product of the previous director’s outstanding program, does a splendid job with his productions. More importantly, he does a superb job with his students. They – and their education – come first.

    

One of the most important lessons I learned teaching large groups of teenagers in producing a show, whether on the stage or with a marching band, was that it was more important how the show was created than that it was created. No matter how good the production – and I created some wonderful shows, and I created some that were not so wonderful – the details of it will be forgotten in at most a few years by everyone who saw it. But the growth that the performers experience in its creation will last the rest of their lives.

Whenever I wrote a field show, I shared that creative process with the students who were going to participate in it. We always went out of our way to put together different shows than other schools were doing – something that we thought would stand out. But the real reason they were different is that they weren’t canned productions that were sold as one size fits all. We wrote shows that meant something to the students who performed them.

Once we bought some music for a Cirque de Soleil show called La Nouba, and there was quite a bit of the music that we really liked. But it was clear that if we simply wrote a marching drill to the show as written, it would be just another show. So we took the parts we liked, and imagined what it sounded like to us. The group decision – rebirth after a nuclear war. On top of that, we had new uniforms coming in over the summer, and having a big “reveal” would be a fun thing to do for our home audience.

So I created the show AFTERMATH, where the students wore rain ponchos in the school’s orange over their new unis. The opening simulated an atomic explosion to the ending music from the Firebird Suite, ending in the soft and slow Barber’s Adagio for Strings with our solo violinist (I allowed any instrument I could reasonably use into the band – meet the students where they are). Next the students gathered around garbage cans like in the nuclear wreckage (we let them do a full band drum feature on garbage cans here – I don’t recall who thought of that, but it wasn’t me).

Then the rest of the show is the resurrection from the “aftermath” of war. (We used lots of quotes over a loudspeaker in breaks between songs – like Einstein’s, “I know not what weapons World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”.) The band turned away from the audience as the pit played, and removed their ponchos, then turned to reveal their new uniforms while playing one of the big pieces from the La Nouba show we liked. We used a requiem from Saving Private Ryan called “Hymn To The Fallen” to recognize the cost of war, and use a drill that I’d really liked and thought would be something the students would enjoy and learn lots of discipline and technique from.

We wanted to close with the other La Nouba tune we liked, crossed with the exuberant and celebratory part of the Firebird Suite we’d opened with, but we had to get there somehow. The idea of re-discovering the previous world’s music came to someone’s mind, and we brainstormed a collection of musical snippets that they could “dig up” – the saxes found “In The Mood”, the upper winds found “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”, the pit guitars found “Back In Black” (one of the school’s theme songs – playing to our home audience!), the low brass found “Amazing Grace”, “Beethoven’s 5^th”, and they even came up with the idea of “discovering” the Macarena, rejecting it, and putting it back into the ground!

To top it off, the pep band was heavily into using “Louie Louie” as their “theme” that season, so that was the piece that wrapped up the discovery section – all of the marchers came together to play that one when it was discovered, and then I wrote an easy segue into that closer.

This show was probably the most successful one we did while I was at Jerome: not because it was the most sophisticated or the best written or anything, but because it was a show that the entire ensemble had bought into during creation (which, by the way, continues all the way through rehearsals, and even during the last week of the season we still change things!). It also happened to be the first year that Jerome’s band surpassed the local bell-cow program to win the district championship, and that wasn’t by accident.

And I know that kind of thing happened with this production of Mary Poppins. The directors would often ask my son to simply create some choreography to fit a particular song or transition. And he wasn’t the only one – the directors trusted the students’ ideas, and knew they could veto anything that wasn’t appropriate, or perhaps didn’t fit with the rest of the show. This investment encouraged the students to buy into the production. My son, for example, spent a great deal of time trying to figure out the backstory of his character, so his created material fit the background of Bert. (He decided that Bert was a previous child of Mary’s nannying, which explained his affection for her.) The directors allowed each student to explore their character, to instill some of their own personality into those creations.

And they cast every play incredibly well – you cannot imagine anyone else playing those characters. (That goes along with choosing the right play! That’s a challenge for choosing the right music for a band as well – who are you going to want to feature, which are your strong sections and who will you need to hide or bolster, that sort of thing.)

More tomorrow – when I’ll tell you about the last field show I ever wrote and taught, and how appropriate it was!