Among the many adages in theater is one about final dress rehearsals: Set a goal to be good as possible, but short of so good that those in the production lose their edge for opening night.
Based on everything we saw during its final full run-through last night, the Saline High School Drama Club is set to hit all the right notes with Shrek the Musical, beginning with its first show this evening. Tickets are still available for all three dates, but the dinner theater option is sold out. [1-5]
- March 1 (Friday), with curtain at 7:30pm
- March 2 (Saturday), with curtain at 7:30pm
- March 3 (Sunday), with curtain at 2:00pm
From her first conversations with =Saline Journal in lead-up to this day, Producer and Artistic Director Kristen Glatz has emphized collaboration as the key to success. As we reported earlier this month, many of those parts developed in parallel, but separately until Sitzprobe seven days ago. [6,7]
Final dress rehearsal was a whole other order of magnitude.
Starting at 3:00pm, one of the orchestra rooms was opened for meal service in recognition of all that needed to be fit in between end of school day and scheduled wrap at 8:00pm for the evening. Student actor Ryan Moore was in the makeup chair by 3:45pm (after having had his hair cut to a significantly shorter length for better skull cap fit); playing the title role, his transformation takes the most time — a minimum forty-five minutes.
Next to that room, wardrobe was abuzz with several dozen additional castmembers getting into wardrobe, then heading to yet another dedicated area for vocal warm-up.
In the theater itself, full orchestra was in the pit, with Conducter Scot Cannell reviewing recommended tempo adjustments. On stage, several lighting banks had been lowered to the floor for adjustment and validation by yet another technical discipline. [8,9]
Shrek the Musical is in many ways the model of a traditional fairy tail. It is accessable for almost any age group, simple plot. The promised magic of Shrek the Musical, then, is the process by which that story is set out on stage. And this is where an true appreciation for the context that Ms Glantz has explained shows its shine. [10]
Physical sets, for example, are both minimal and substantively detailed. Married to often finely detailed and creatively conceived lighting schemes, they focus attention. Take the audience to vastly different environments. And in some numbers, simply get out of the way.
At the same time, switching among them between acts provides its own unobtrusive bit of choreography. All-but-invisible stage crew members noiselessly move the largest properties with neither fuss nor muss, behind the curtain or right before your very eyes on an unlit stage. Concurrently, orchestral contributions are brought up to suggest audience members’ ears are the better place to focus all the while.
Taking a step back for a better look at the SHS Drama Club blocking of Shrek, it’s necessary to look at the Ellen A Ewing Center for the Performing Arts itself as key element, if not character. With 1,000 seats on three levels, the challenges to both actors and director are as considerable as the opportunities. Is it possible or even desirable to provide the same visual experience in every act to every perspective? How and in what sequences should exposition move comfortably between baroque and intimate?
With a dress rehearsal access available to a limited few last night, Saline Journal had free reign to sample widely from among those options. Throughout, sets and actors, solos and full choruses, were nothing short of visual candy.
Additional images are available on our flickr feed, of course. But that was last night, before the final ingredient of audience was available to complete this collaboration.
References
- “Saline High School” Saline Area Schools.
- SHS Drama Club (home page).
- “Shrek: The Musical” SHS Drama Club.
- “David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori on Shrek the Musical” WNYC (July 9, 2009) YouTube.
- “Culinary Arts” South & West Washtenaw Consortium: SWWC.
- “Almost thirty years ago, Shrek was sent forth from the swamp, on a journey that will now bring him to our high school stage” Dell Deaton (February 7, 2019) Saline Journal.
- “The Sitzprobe … a lost art form!” (September 2010) David Cangelosi.
- “Orchestras” Saline Area Schools.
- Hornet Light and Sound (home page).
- “Fairy tale” Cambridge.
- “The 5 Stagest of Blocking a Scene” Peter D Marshall (June 18, 2009) New York Film Academy.
- Dell Deaton (flickr feed).
