Broadway favorites hit Musical Theatre

People love their musicals, which is why GCSU has a whole class dedicated to producing musical theater scenes. Does building a performance based off famous musicals that you can cast yourself and direct your peers, and then performing to a live audience sound fun? To the students in the Music Theatre Scenes class it does.

This past Wednesday, the GCSU Department of Music presented “Little Shop of Hair Products.” Dr. Wendy Mullen coordinated the class and the collaboration of her students work on stage and Jenny Moore on piano, the mini-show presented to a full house.

Students from all majors (mostly theater, mass communications and music education) auditioned for the musical theater scenes class at the beginning of the semester. Wendy Mullen, coordinator of the class, then added the students that pass the audition into the class.

The class met Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3:30 p.m.-5 p.m. to collaborate and rehearse musical theater scenes.

Amy Carpenter, a freshman theater major explained that “(At the beginning of the class, Mullen) asked us to write down our dream roles.”

Mullen then pulled from common shows that the students wrote down to come up with a “playlist” of scenes from famous musicals that the students could work on.

The scenes presented were from “Little Shop of Horrors,” “Hairspray” and “Grease.” The combination of the musicals became the class presentation’s title: “Little Shop of Hair Products.”

“We tried to keep themes – with music from the 50′s and 60′s,” said Carpenter. “Wendy decided what parts everyone would play and asked what we wanted to do (production-wise) and people came forward as they wanted to choreograph or direct.”

Students in the class did everything from acting, singing and dancing to directing, choreographing, designing costumes, lights and posters, and managing the stage.

“It was long, we had a lot of practices, lots of choreography and singing vocals with choreography was difficult,” Leah Keelan, a freshman theater major said, “we really bonded as a class.”

The final performance consisted of a brief overview of each musical before two or three selections from the musical were performed. Some famous selections include “Suddenly Seymour” from “Little Shop of Horrors,” “Mama I’m a big girl now” from Hairspray and “Beauty School Dropout” from “Grease.”

Carpenter said “It was so much fun. You put on a show with all your friends from the theater department, you don’t really think of it as work.”

The hard work lead to a live performance for a big audience in Max Noah. Parents and families of the performers were there as well as their peers whooped and clapped with each new song and scene.

“We were working on something we love to do,” Keelan said. “It was cool to have an audience.”

Posted by Rachel Moldovan on Apr 30 2010. Filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry