After our drama department knew we wanted to write a play of awesome for the spring show, we immediately began auditions. It's always cool how perfect for the parts each person is, and one of the cool things about this play is that we were each playing ourselves! That made for all our efforts to go into improvisation and projection and more technical aspects of the show rather than portraying a character contrary to ourselves.
Not only were we perfect for the parts, but we were perfect for each other. The cast became like a big huge family and I seriously love every single person involved with this show. I don't think I could ever stress how thankful I am for this cast.
(I also think these were the coolest shirts ever.)
A funny little fact about the show is that Neil, the author, (and you can read his blog here!) is Canadian, and one of our main characters, Caleb, is Canadian! He had a cute little moose that sang songs about Canada and he even made a couple appearances on the stage. Hooray for Canada!
We were worried about there being too much black and white on the stage, so some of our favorite awesome things that had been cut from the show were redeemed with a spot on one of the flats!
I got the idea to do a giant mural for our "family room," complete with some family portraits!
There are a lot of traditions for our shows, one of which is doing a chant before we perform. We added a couple new traditions though, such as singing "We Are Young" at the top of our lungs and dancing backstage. Yeah, we're crazy drama kids.
This is the book that started it all.
One thing in particular about this show that was different was the fact that we got to perform it all week. It was always sad in the past to work for multiple months on a show that we only performed for two nights. (Granted all the shows in the past were very stressful so two nights was about all we could take!) The Play of Awesome was virtually stress free because of the small cast, I think. No having to deal with a 40+ member choir and 20+ person cast. A little bit really does go a long way.
It's funny though because I'm sad that this show is over, even though it's been extended for so long. I just want to perform it again!
There was a lot of improv involved with this show, just because the script was flexible enough for us to do so. This left for many a laugh behind the stage. Some of the things people said on stage were just too funny! And we could laugh because the audience was laughing louder than we were, so they didn't notice us chuckling backstage(for the most part, hehe).
Aaah just look at how beautiful that set is!
Stay tuned for a post about the actual performances and the after party!
Finally the long awaited Play of Awesome posts! My school's drama department just finished a fantastic journey that a few short months ago was nothing more than a crazy idea.
While we were still working on A Christmas Carol, we (the Advanced Drama class, that is) began thinking of things to do for our spring production. Since the beginning of the year, Mr. Benson, our drama teacher, read the Book of Awesome to us at the beginning of class to de-stress us from a long day at school and to loosen up for acting class. The book quickly became a tradition and everyone wanted to read from it. And when wondering what to do for our spring show, we suggested that we do the Book of Awesome!
Mr. Benson emailed the author, Neil Pasrisha, (you can read his super cool blog here!) asking if we could have performance rights (and whatever other rights we needed) to create this play. A mere seventeen minutes later he emailed us back giving us full rights to the show only if we did an awesome job and send him part of the play.
After that, the next few months were total insanity.
This was going to be a completely student run show. Mr. Benson was the producer, to oversee things, but the students directed it and wrote it and blocked it and casted it and everything. I was put in charge of the set, and together we brainstormed for the color scheme and overall look of the set. We wanted to have a black and white scheme to match the scheme of the book (the copy we had was not one of the ones with color on it). But then I got the idea to have super bright accent colors, and after we purchased extra copies of the book (the ones with color on it) I just had to laugh at how ironic it was that the book had bright colors on it! Score!
One thing that we wanted to do to make this show different from any other show was to incorporate video into it. Matt (my boyfriend) did an amazing job directing and editing the videos for the show. We called this a theatrical cinematic experience, and what an experience it was!
The hardest part I think was actually writing the script. The book is set up into different monologues, so to speak, so the bulk of our show was going to be filled with monologues. Honestly I thought at first that the show would be not that great because I thought it would be us giving a whole bunch of disjointed lines, but seemingly unrelated monologues evolved into a full length play complete with a story line. We poured over the book, picking out our favorite topics and trying to string them together, and eventually it turned into a "day in the life" sort of play. Oh man I wish you guys could have seen it!
Here's the basic story plot: It's Mary's birthday, and we all have to buy presents for her surprise party. In the meantime, Caleb gets left behind and everyone forgets about him until he shows up to Mary's party cold and wet from the harsh Alaskan winter; and Mary thinks everyone forgot about her birthday. The play follows Mary, Caleb, and then the group going to the mall beginning from everyone's morning until we are all together at her party. And all throughout the day we experience little awesome things like peeling an orange in one shot, or the five second rule, or couch forts, or licking cake batter off the beater. I'm still amazed at how elegantly it all flowed together.
Not only did the script flow together, but the cast was seriously the best possible cast ever. We became our own little family in this world we built (and outside it) and I love these people so much. I'm still not fully believing that this play is over. I think it's my favorite play I've ever been in and people have been saying it's the best play our school has put on!
Another challenge was the stage itself. We've never performed on the chapel stage, but I think it was for the best because it makes for a more homey feel than the big stage.
Weeks before the show I was making pillows to make the set even better, and the day before we were adding even more color to the flats to make the set look its best.
Stay tuned for even more play of awesome posts!
day 92
I took some photos for church today.
