Show will go on for Charleroi Area
By TAYLOR BROWN
tbrown@yourmvi.com
There is never a dull moment in theater.
On Wednesday night as Charleroi Area students prepared to take their bows for the final dress rehearsal for their spring musical, “Princess Whatsername,” a fog machine set off a smoke alarm in the auditorium, sending the cast and crew outside in full costume.
As firefighters cleared the scene, cast members didn’t waste the opportunity to sing one final number outside, despite lights and sirens in the background.
The cast will perform two in-person shows this weekend — today and Saturday — for the family and friends of cast and crew members.
“We are fortunate that we are able to have two small performances in person,” director Melissa Vitali said. “Each student involved in the show received vouchers for two tickets per show. Then when the capacity was raised, we opened it up for them to get two more tickets.”
The show, which will take audience members to a classic fairytale setting in the Misty Forest, will not be performed for the public.
However, the district plans to host a livestreamed event for the community and other students March 20. More details will be announced later.
The show, which features 67 students, cast and crew members in sixth through 12th grades, is a spin on the classic story of Sleeping Beauty. She meets a variety of fairytale favorites such as Hansel and Gretel, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, along with a very unique set of Seven Dwarfs, who will help her learn her true identity.
Vitali said the adventurous but comedic score was chosen to make sure the curtain could rise despite the pandemic.
“We chose a smaller show because we weren’t sure what was going to happen as far as performances,” she said, “so we wanted to stay smaller scale with a publishing house that allows us to stream the show.”
She never planned to let the pandemic stop her kids from performing.
“We were all determined to have this performance to give our students some much needed normalcy,” Vitali said. “It has been a crazy year for us all and it was nice to have the support of one another and to do something that we all love to do.”
Preparing for opening night has been different than ever before because of ongoing restrictions, but Vitali’s students are ready to take the stage.
“We have had times when the school was shut down, so we had virtual rehearsals on Google,” she said. “We have had students that have had to quarantine so they participated in rehearsals virtually with our student director (Sarahgrace Porter) walking the scene while the actor did the lines.
“The students have been masked for all rehearsals, they have assigned seats in the auditorium so that we were able to do contact tracing if necessary, temperatures were taken prior to each rehearsal and we have all of the music posted online in our Google Classroom so that the kids could rehearse at home. We were one of the few schools that were able to do a show last year — the lockdown started the Friday after our show — so this has been an adventure planning.”
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