We were heading towards the final weekend of performances for “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” when the word came down from the Governor last March that anyplace where people gathered would need to close.
We had another show, “Other People’s Money,” that had been rehearsing for some weeks and for which the set had been built and the costumes readied – that show would never open.
The good news was that our patrons were so kind and most of them donated their tickets back to us instead of requesting a refund. They were all sympathetic and disappointed, but understood that it was out of our control.
Our annual student-directed, student-designed, student-acted one-act festival had to migrate to online and unfortunately was not the live theatre experience we’d promised our students.
Our big summer musical, “Anything Goes,” had gone through several nights of auditions; the callback auditions were announced but casting was never completed.
Normally the spring would be the time we would release our next year’s season brochure with a full series of plays, but with so much uncertainty, the season cannot be planned. We still have no idea when we’ll be able to welcome audiences back into the theatres.
On a positive note, all of our classes immediately transferred to an on-line, primarily synchronous, Zoom-based environment. It was really great to be able to connect to the students and for them to connect to each other and try to preserve some vestige of normalcy.
This fall we have two productions, the first is a musical revue that features songs from some of the best loved musicals we’ve produced over our nearly 80-year history which we rehearsed outside and then took into the Garvin Theatre. Our designers created a beautiful visual frame. Our technological wizard Ben Crop headed up the filming and editing to produce a professional-looking musical event. *
Our second theatre production will be a Zoom-based production of “Antigone” directed by Michael Gros, featuring students from all over the world. Michael Gros notes that “Antigone” has many themes reflecting our current national circumstances (hubris, church vs. state, criminal justice, autocracy, etc.) and in a nod to this being a fully student production, will be presented with an embrace of the look and feel of graphic novels, though with filmed action.
What we’ve been able to take away from this experience:
- We always tell our students how important it is to be flexible, adaptable and tenacious. This period has really tested our ability to live out those traits.
- Theatre people are very adept at planning. We always reverse engineer our process from opening night. With the projects we’re working on right now we’ve had to make multiple plans. We have a plan for producing our show outdoors, indoors and over Zoom.
- You have to pay attention to details. Great acting and art is in the details. In this case, the details involved all the netting down of safety protocols, scheduling and having every detail in place.
Humans need creativity and connection in their lives. We saw how much our students were craving the ability to work together and re-engage their artistic selves. It seems like this is more important than ever.
* Special thanks to:
Clarice Hillebrand
James Watson
Chien-ei Yu and SBCC Film Production
Paul DeJong
Curtis Bieber
Tony Ruggieri
Our season sponsor – SBCC Foundation
And our very supportive administrators: Drs. Elizabeth Imhof, Pamela Ralston and Utpal Goswami.
We couldn't have produced "Looking Back, Looking Forward" without their help.
