Coming to the stage soon is the Park theater’s production of “Emma: A pop musical!” This will be performed at the Park’s middle school this coming November. The musical will be about a matchmaker named Emma finding love for a sophomore student named Harriet. The musical is based on the Jane Austen novel.
Director Jodi Schifsky said “Emma” was a great musical choice for this school year because it includes well known songs that many people can enjoy.
“It’s super family friendly and we like the recognizable songs, so that’s a draw for the audience to hum along to,” Schifsky said.
The construction at Park is making it more difficult for the cast to come together and rehearse. According to junior Kaylee Rice, this problem will add a different feel to putting the play together than in previous years.
“It’s definitely going to be different from past years. We are going to be rehearsing and building everything at Central and then moving it to the middle school a week before tech week,” Rice said. “So all of our sets have to be built to fit through your standard door frame. It will definitely be a thought process while we build things.”
This puts a lot of extra pressure on the cast because they will receive fewer rehearsals on the stage where they will be performing. Schifsky said the construction created a scramble for the group because they found out about it just a few weeks prior to the start of school.
“It has a major impact on us because we did not find out until two weeks before school started,” Schifsky said. “So we had to scramble to figure out where to perform and luckily we’re performing at the middle school.”
According to sophomore Elliott Netoff, the musical this year will consist of both cast and crew, giving crew members an opportunity to be part of scenes.
“There are crew members who have volunteered to be part of our chorus — the people who are in the background dancing and singing to make scenes larger than life,” Netoff said. “These crew members have decided they want to be a part of that. So we’re going to actually have crew members on stage with us.”
Along with crew members joining the cast, Rice said she is excited to see the theater community growing by having more freshmen join than previous years.
“We have a lot of freshmen this year, which I’m really excited for because it means there are a lot of people interested in theater,” Rice said. “We have a lot of new freshmen in crew, which is really nice. When I started freshman year, it was me and four other freshmen and instead it’s more like 15.”
