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By Jacob Cox
Recently the NS drama department performed “All Together Now,” a musical showcase last Friday and Saturday. The performance was set up in order to help raise money from problems during COVID and not being able to perform.
“‘All Together Now’ is a big global anniversary celebration for MTI,” senior Megan Nielson said. “MTI is a big musical producer, and there are several thousand high schools and other companies participating and celebrating musical theater.”
Because so many schools and companies worldwide are performing, the cost for the songs is absolutely free.
“[MTI] created this free showcase of songs that any theater or school across the world could do for free, as long as you did it on this certain weekend,” drama teacher Alex Barlow said. “The point is to have a whole bunch of theaters from across the world doing the same show on the same weekend as the celebration of theater coming back for COVID. For most places, this will be the first live show they’ve had since COVID, which will be really big.”
And with this free showcasing of songs comes songs from Newsies, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Mamma Mia, High School musical and more.
“We as a whole drama department performed a few songs,” junior Ahnali Morris said. “Junie B Jones, ‘Writing down a story of my life’, there was High School Musicals ‘We’re Aall in Tthis together’, Newsies’ ‘Seize the Day’, and then a bunch of others as well.”
And because those songs are a free showcasing, and the anniversary or celebration for MTI is going on, it will only be for this year, which led the drama department to want to perform “All Together Now” even more.
“I saw some information about it on a website,” Barlow said, “I thought it sounded like a really cool event because it’s a once in a lifetime event, and the fact that the royalties are free is really huge. They did it a lot of ways for theaters to raise funds, so this hasn’t cost us anything, so hopefully this will be able to get us some fund raises for our big musical.”
And while this performance is a once in a lifetime deal, it has also helped the drama department get ready for their upcoming musical, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”
“There was no audition or anything, it’s just everyone in the musical theater class.” Nielson said. “It’s kind of just a way for us to bond and get ready for our upcoming musical. We had a lot of tryouts for this year’s musical, and part of the reason I think is because of ‘All Together Now.’”
With ‘All Together Now’ now over, the drama department has gotten a lot of feedback about themselves from how the showings Friday and Saturday went.
“I thought the overall performance went really well,” Barlow said. “The shows themselves ran pretty smoothly and I think the students performed very well.”
And while the performance ran quite well, they didn’t have a huge turnout, turnout was what they expected, with not huge crowdsmany coming, but they still managed to get a few hundred people at the performance each night.
“The turnout was about what I expected. I knew it wouldn’t be as many people as our regular musicals,” Barlow said. “We also did not do as much promoting as we do for our large main stage musicals, but we probably had somewhere between 400-500 people between both nights. I think we definitely could’ve improved spreading the word more about the show and helped people better understand what it was.”
Still, with a good performance and a few hundred in the audience each night, the drama department was happy with the turnout and actually having an audience.
“I was really glad to have a chance to perform and have a live audience there,” Morris said. “I think having an audience helped us work hard and perform well, and while there are always things to work on, I thought we did a good job with everything.”
