SHS Drama Club held its “audition workshop” yesterday for students interested in appearing on stage as part of Newsies: The Musical, set to debut at the Ellen A Ewing Performing Arts Center on February 28, 2020. [1-5]
If that feels like a bit of a whirlwind on the heals of closing matinee for its fall play 12 Angry Jurors, those who were a part of the audience are undoubtedly not alone in the sentiment. Traces of set placement markings were still visible on the floor. And quite a few Jurors cast members were here again among the dozen hopefuls. [6]
It wouldn’t have been a surprise to see a bit of theatrical makeup having survived behind one ear or more.
But dedicated pre-production on Newsies was well underway long before November 26. In fact, its start pre-dates onset of the 2019-2020 theater season itself — overlapping tail end of last year. It’s another example of another part of all that it takes to make things work in the Saline Area Schools theater department. [7-9]
Saline Area Schools Cultural Arts Program Specialist & Theater Manager Rebecca Groeb will take the director’s chair this round, following a schedule of rotating responsibilities with Kristen Glatz for the high school musical. When discussing this then-embargoed selection with =Saline Journal in August, Ms Groeb described the choice of script as “pretty obvious.
There’s a lot of interest right now in news reporting itself. People have a lot of ways of finding out what’s going on in their world and down the street. But that’s not the same as ‘journalism’ as a profession, and that’s important to them. [10,11]
Well — what makes that happen? What happens in the business behind it?
I interned for The Saline Reporter for a while when I was in college: When Paul Tull was still running it. You know what it was like. People remember that. People could tell the difference between that and when it became part of Heritage. [12-15]
So Newsies does what theater does. It takes something important, or part of something important, and puts it on stage as a way of connecting it with an audience. It’s entertaining. If that’s all you’re after, you’re still really satisfied by that. If you’re just curious where the seeds of the story came from, there’s something to know in this case. And if it opens a door for you, there are all sorts of places you can go to really get into it elsewhere, after you’ve seen the performance.
In this case, IMDb has summarized the show as follows.
A musical based on the New York City newsboy strike of 1899. When young newspaper sellers are exploited beyond reason by their bosses they set out to enact change and are met by the ruthlessness of big business.
To this end, the Saline High School Drama Club audition workshop was important to giving prospective 2020 performance cast members here as taste selected musical numbers, dialogue, and physical interactions. It also provided opportunity for words of caution.
“Don’t go watch the movie over Thanksgiving and decide what character you want to play,” Ms Groeb told the assembly this week, “and get it in your mind, ‘That’s how I’m going to play the character.’ That won’t help you here. It will hurt you; it will restrain you.
When you look at what someone else did on stage, you’re seeing the vision of that director, on that stage, with that actor. It may be phenomenal. But all sorts of things change when you are doing it, at a different time, in this theater, with this production.
I can tell you stories about actors who were playing the same part for years and everyone thought, ‘They’ve really got that down!’ Then they changed it up. And that was great too. Sometimes is was better. Sometimes it wasn’t as good — but you didn’t know that until you had the different performance for comparison.
A few years ago, right here in Saline, Ms Glatz and I cast a student who went out and memorized his character’s performance from something found on the Internet. That was it for him and we couldn’t direct him out of it. He did a really good job of duplicating what he’d seen. Really good. But it wasn’t him.
And everything suffered for that. We knew he had something better to offer to the part, and we wanted to see that.
Besides: Where’s the fun in putting on a production that’s just a copy of someone else’s vision?
This echoed what Rebecca Groeb had consistently told Saline Journal at various points in her pre-production work on Newsies before start of this school year. She’d obviously seen Newsies performed elsewhere, and she needed tangible ways of communicating her intended direction for the SHS Drama Club production to set designers, costuming, and countless other people on the large team that will ultimately come together for this project.
“I tear a lot of pages out of magazines,” she explained. “All sorts of magazines. Regular magazines. And I put the pictures into file folders and show them to people. It’s not rigid, because I want others’ ideas too — collaboration. But this is how I like to start with the visioning.
I think the best performances are those that bring something unique, something you haven’t seen before even if you’ve seen that show performed in many different venues, for years.
‘Unique’ doesn’t have to be ‘big’ or ‘different’ for the sake of being different. But a lot of what makes things great is when you make it yours.
References
- SHS Drama Club (home page).
- “Newsies (1992)” IMDb.
- “Newsies: The Musical” (February 28, 2020) Saline Journal.
- “Newsies: The Musical” (February 29, 2020) Saline Journal.
- “Newsies: The Musical” (March 1, 2020) Saline Journal.
- “’12 Angry Jurors’ convene to decide one man’s fate in SHS Drama Club stage production November 22, 23, and 24, 2019” Dell Deaton (November 18, 2019) Saline Journal.
- “Hornet Light and Sound is set to debut 2019-2020 theater season at SHS on September 12 (no reason you should notice)” Dell Deaton (August 19, 2019) Saline Journal.
- “SHS Drama Club ‘Shrek the Musical’ plays Ellen A Ewing Center for the Performing Arts, ready to exceed expectations” Dell Deaton (March 1, 2019) Saline Journal.
- “Saline Community Education Cultural Arts” Saline Area Schools.
- “Book review: ‘Unfreedom of the Press’ sets stage for necessary discussion of integrity in journalism, ‘objective’ media” Dell Deaton (August 14, 2019) Saline Journal.
- “Expert panel discussed role, value, and financing needs of local media outlets during A2Y Regional Chamber breakfast” Dell Deaton (September 19, 2019) Saline Journal.
- “Saline Reporter” Central Michigan University: Digital Michigan Newspapers.
- “The Reporter” Central Michigan University: Digital Michigan Newspapers.
- “Exclusive interview with Brian Cox, former journalist with ‘The Saline Reporter,’ on loss of local media: Part 1” Dell Deaton (September 16, 2019) Saline Journal.
- “Exclusive interview with Brian Cox, former journalist with ‘The Saline Reporter,’ on loss of local media: Part 2” Dell Deaton (September 17, 2019) Saline Journal.
- “There is much more to Saline Community Education ‘Junior Theater’ than its stage performances this weekend” Dell Deaton (March 11, 2019) Saline Journal.
