By: Aidan Hatch
Stacy Galvan, the Drama teacher at Redwood High school, has had to rethink the entire Shrek the Musical production process due to the Covid-19 Pandemic. With school being online and the restriction of large groups meeting, she has been gearing up for a completely virtual musical.
“It really made me sit down and make lesson plans, and think what is the goal for this school year”, says Galvan. Since the musical is an extracurricular activity, she has had no time to work with her kids in the classroom.
However, the drama staff has maintained the same after school schedule, only now the meetings are completely virtual.
If for some reason the number of Covid-19 cases happens to decrease, Galvan has prepared by, “giving them [drama students] two sets of directions”. Every time she gives an instruction or critique, she explains it for a virtual setting as well as a live one.
Shifting away from live production, Galvan has been adapting to her situation by “learning how to position cameras and learning how to use your camera … but teaching that has been interesting because I’m not a T.V. director”.
She and the drama teachers from other high schools “sat down … and just basically said we’ve got to do acting for television”. Galvan feels that this change in the production system has made her a better teacher by broadening her Drama pallet.
In spite of doing the drama production completely online, Galvan and her team have started to use technology to their advantage.
“On Tuesdays, our two choreographers get together … and they literally work for six hours”
Mrs. Galvan
The two lead choreographers film videos of their work and post them to a Google Classroom drama page. They post a video that has been broken down count by count for each student, and they post a full choreography video.
Galvan feels that the largest struggle throughout the whole experience has been fitting students for their costumes. Normally, costumes for the musical never leave the classroom however, the students “are picking up their costumes so they can try them on at home, and then sending us pictures”.
In addition, she has had a hard time providing the stage production students with their normal tasks. “A huge piece of stagecraft is building the set for the show, and doing all the painting”, but unfortunately there is no set to build.
Instead, Galvan has been working on a virtual alternative. Although it is not set in stone, she has been reaching out to a company that transitions the background, so “while they’re moving, the projection actually moves, so it looks like they’re moving.”
“It’s not going to be streamed live for tickets … because we can’t”. In order to make money and avoid any copyright issues, Galvan and her students would have to perform the play live in one sitting, but unfortunately, that is not possible.
In order to cross this hurdle, she will not be charging any money to view the musical. “Once post-production is done we will be releasing it to the public, but we cannot put it on YouTube because that’s against copyright laws”. A link will be sent out to parents, Redwood staff, and Visalia Unified School District.
Kylen Gray ’22 will be starring in the virtual production as Shrek.
Gray feels that due to the disconnection between actors and the people “who make the show happen like costume and makeup, we weren’t able to get the full effect that we usually do”.
In spite of that, he says,
“We’re doing the best we can with what we have, and hopefully we’ll be able to pull it off.”
During a time in which it would be easy to give up, Gray remains positive and hopeful.
When going into a virtual rehearsal Gray tries to remember to “keep with it and try not to be too pessimistic … because it’s easy to be pessimistic about things when you can’t really make them happen.”
He shows a lot of compassion towards his classmates and is excited to have the opportunity to work with them.
“The fact that we’re doing it from home and we have at least fifty people doing it is pretty impressive, and I think there’s a lot of dedication there”. Although the cast is about half compared to a live production cast, both Gray and Galvan are happy with the turnout for the virtual musical.
The Drama production is changing due to Covid-19, however, both students and teachers are trying to keep positive attitudes throughout the whole process. They are finding new ways to use technology to their advantage, and most importantly, they are trying to keep it fun for the audience.