The Parkway North Theater Department has been working on their first production that will be performed for a live audience since March of 2020. The production will be shown on Nov. 3-5 in the North theater.
One concern is regarding the safety of the audience due to COVID-19 guidelines and social distancing. Masks are required for all audience members and the theater is now limited to 150 people in the audience. Families will also be seated in pods with two seats between each individual group as well as using only half of the rows in the audience to maintain social distance.
The production of “Brothers Grimm Spectaculathon” will feature 11 actors while combining all 209 of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales including “Snow White” and “Rapunzel”. The run time of the show ranges from 100-110 minutes with lots of jokes, costume changes, and classic characters.
“Having the amount of actors we do is a benefit and a difficulty at times. On one hand, it is safer because of COVID and it is easier to know who people are when there are fewer of them, but we have so many characters. A lot of them are going to have moments where they have less than a minute off stage to transition between characters. It is very stressful, especially with new actors,” said junior Amelie Vogt, one of the leads of the costume crew.
Due to the theater department not meeting last year for safety reasons, only about half of the current members have had experience with a full year of putting on productions. The current juniors and seniors had the opportunity to participate in the Fall and Spring productions in 2019-2020, but the freshmen and sophomores have no previous experience in the Parkway North Theater department.
“It is hard to keep up with everybody sometimes, but there is always someone like an upperclassman or Mr. Little to help. I’d say that I’ve been learning pretty fast and even with the late notice, we are preparing for the show at a good pace,” said freshman Xavier Richey, who joined this year to help with costume design but focuses on marketing and front of house duties.
Originally, the Fall show was planned to be a production of “Tartuffe”, but with a small turn out at auditions, director Chad Little came up with an alternate option that not only suits the cast that auditioned initially, but features more characters than “Tartuffe” did.
“It is crazy seeing the way that the actors have to switch between characters. It’s honestly really impressive and I am excited for people to watch. It was really cool how Mr. Little and all of the cast took this initial problem of not enough people auditioning and completely turned it around and used this as an opportunity,” said senior Dorian Washington.
Students have been working together to regroup as a department and get comfortable with each other as this production is many students’ first time meeting their peers in person.
“I feel like each crew does its own part. When sound and lights get together, they have a lot of fun controlling the music while we get work done. Costumes orders food every Saturday when they get together. Every crew individually is like a family and then we all get along really well together,” said Washington.