Even During the Pandemic, the Show Goes On at CHS

By Danielle Dennehey, 2022

Published 10/14/21

During this past school year, the Cheshire High School Drama Club has overcome obstacles imposed by COVID guidelines in order to provide entertainment and a sense of human connection to the community.

Cheshire High’s guidelines, as instructed by the CDC, have put emphasis on limited in-person interaction, denying the club of the one thing it has built its foundation on. In the beginning, onstage rehearsals were replaced by outdoor and virtual ones. Accompanying these altered rehearsals were Google Meet glitches, muffled voices struggling to project behind the masks, and awkward blocking to keep the actors at a distance from each other.

The biggest loss was the elimination of an audience. Senior member Juliette Markman (2022) recalls, “Having friends, family, and even strangers there to cheer you on is really the push many performers like myself need after a long rehearsal process, but when the shows kind of just ended with no official curtain close, there was really no closure with the shows.”

In order to alleviate these struggles, the drama club resorted to a rigorous brainstorming process filled with collaboration taking place in and out of the club. After attending Broadway workshops and communicating with teachers throughout the country, directors Taryn Chorney and Dawn Demeo made the executive decision to distribute recordings of the past year’s productions of Twelfth Night and Little Women. Productions were filmed with no audience and actors performed their roles masked.

The spring musical specifically utilized a unique split screen format that allowed the viewers to clearly hear and see the actors singing. The normal stage recording with the actors masked was synced with recordings of maskless actors alone in a studio whenever they had to sing.

The mere importance of theater was the driving force that kept the club going during difficult times. Demeo hoped that “the kids would have a safe space where they saw people creatively solving problems and just had somewhere to go in the midst of the chaos which is key to feeling okay.” Many of the students felt changed by the experience. Markman says, “Without this different experience I wouldn’t know that theater is something I want to dedicate my career path to, whatever form that may look like.”

Theater not only benefits those involved but those that consume it. Chorney states that, “Theater is storytelling; theater is connection. It’s communication, and the thing that was so lost in the early days of COVID was the sense of having a community and the sense of being together.”

The CHS Drama Club is looking forward to the possibility of performing maskless on-stage with a masked live audience similar to the countless Broadway and regional productions taking place across the country. The club will continue to entertain the community with its upcoming productions of the outrageous comedy The Red Velvet Cake War in November and the beloved musical Chicago in the spring.