Fall play approved to record performance in-person
Theater will use newly updated auditorium space
Seniors Annica Schultz and Phoebe McKinney rehearse their lines for the fall musical last year, “Legally Blonde.” This year’s production of “Vintage Hitchcock: A Live Radio Play” will be available to stream around the end of November.
November 5, 2020
Because of technology issues during rehearsals and the difficulties with recording a Zoom call, director Jodi Schifsky said they are going to record the fall play, “Vintage Hitchcock: A Live Radio Play,” live without an audience in the high school auditorium.
“We were going to try to do it all through Zoom. But because of different bandwidths that people had from their home connections and different devices that people were using, that we couldn’t do a livestream,” Schifsky said. “We went to the administration and proposed this idea of doing a recorded version in the newly renovated auditorium.”
Senior Ella Miller said she is looking forward to exploring the updated auditorium and the opportunity to have more creativity with costumes now that they are in person.
“There’s construction going on in the auditorium, so I’m really interested to see everything that’s new, the new lighting system and what’s new in the dressing room,” Miller said. “When we were going to do the play on Zoom, there wasn’t much needed from costumes because you were going to see people from the shoulders up. Now that we’ll be able to do it onstage, we get to find people full outfits.”
According to thespian co-president and senior Phoebe McKinney, everything will look very different from a normal play in order to keep actors six feet apart and safe.
“We are going to be socially distanced on stage, and we’re going to be set up in a way where we don’t have to move a whole lot,” McKinney said. “It’s just going to be a bunch of actors with mics, scripts and a piano player.”
Schifsky said because the actors aren’t going to be able to interact as much, they’re using foley sound for the first time to give the play the feeling of a radio show.
“For our technicians, they’re working on these live sound effects. It’s called foley sound, it’s what they used to do for radio shows back in the early half of the century. It was a really great art of creating sound out of everyday objects, so we have people who are doing that from their homes,” Schifsky said.
Because they will be playing different characters without changing costumes, McKinney said they’ve been successful in using just their voices over Zoom to switch between roles.
“Something that’s been going well with rehearsal is with our lack of ability to see each other and move in person with each other, we’ve been learning how to diversify our vocal characterization. Because we all play multiple characters, we’re learning a lot about how to do that,” McKinney said.
According to Schifsky, because the construction on the auditorium is not finished there’s no specific date yet for when the performance will be filmed and then streamed, but it will hopefully be available to watch by the end of November.
“The date has not yet been determined. We’re hoping it will be mid-November because we have to wait for the auditorium renovations to be completed before we can get trained on the new light board. So we’re shooting for mid-November, but we’ll probably stream it at the end of the month,” Schifsky said.
