This past weekend, Greenwood students put on outstanding performances of Mamma Mia! for a total of three shows.
The energy carried over from tech week and drive to perform well was very high opening night.
“I think overall our energy and background acting is something that we worked on a lot during rehearsal. I think that on show nights that just kind of came out more than any other time because just having the audience there helped us push to have good energy and create an engaging background,” sophomore Ellanor Arkins, Rosie, said.
The show’s complexity caused many problems both on and off of the stage. The cast and crew had to come up with unique and creative solutions to make sure the production was foolproof.
“Our biggest issue was moving props until we just ended up giving certain people different jobs. We told them that if they did not do what they were supposed to, we would find someone else. For example, the chairs in Tanya’s scene where she’s at the beach, it was so hard to get the guys to actually get their cue on right. We ended up having to separate the chairs and put them in numerical order,” Roneekeisha-Colin Beaugris, stage manager, said.
The show was very physically and vocally demanding for the cast, as Mamma Mia! includes a whopping 28 songs. The typical musical has 15-20 songs.
“The show has an incredible amount of songs in total, and so just working through that was a challenge. All of them have different parts and a lot of them are a little strange so we had to work on that a lot throughout rehearsals. A lot of people’s voices started to give out because we were doing full runs every single night during tech week. It was just a huge effort of preserving everyone’s voice to make sure they were not doing anything strenuous or finding out ways to just adapt if needed,” Arkins said.
Upperclassmen that held a lead role or important crew position learned a lot about leadership as they mentored the underclassmen on and off stage.
“Taking my time to explain certain things was very important; if they needed extra help or they did not understand what they were supposed to do I took the extra time to explain it to them. For our skit, I had to explain what I needed in a much simpler way and even act it out for the underclassmen,” Lilyana Luhigo, Dance Captain, said.
After the final show, the cast celebrated their success by getting some much-needed rest. During the week before the first show, the cast and crew were at the school doing runs until 10 p.m.
“After the show Sunday, I think we were all just hungry and tired. I know a lot of the lead cast skipped school Monday and slept in until like two in the afternoon because we were just so exhausted. It was worth it though because I feel like we put on an amazing show,” Luhigo said.
