Summer 2010

Musical Theatre Production and its subsequent production Pure Imagination, helped students learn the importance of the technical aspects of building and mounting a grand scale production. For the first time, stage managers were used--students without acting roles who specifically helped in the organization and day-to-day running of the production. Students learned time management as they were not only cast members, but part of at least two different crews. The set construction and painting, costume alterations and care, properties gathering and care, and publicity needs (poster distribution, headshots, lobby decor, ushering) were entirely completed by students, with supervision from the director/teacher, the director's assistant and high school mentors. All this while memorizing lines, learning blocking, rehearsing fourteen songs and choreography!

WOW!

Once upon a time...Pure Imagination was a jukebox musical with songs and music from all the wonderful fairy tales, fables, and fantasies that have graced the stage and screen throughout history. Childhood favorites from both Broadway and the West End as well as cinema, along with some classic standards and fantastical new “classics” were chosen and adapted to create a new fairy tale, a new fable, a new fantasy about four children who didn’t believe in stories and their magical babysitter who made them think “outside the book.” Featuring songs from stage musicals such as Once Upon a Mattress, Wicked, and Mary Poppins; beloved movie musicals like The Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan, classics like Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance and new “classics” such as Rob Gardner’s Blackbeard, these children and their new-found friends discover that anything can happen if they "think outside the books."

And they lived happily, or should we say, imaginatively ever after.