Northwest Academy presented the musical SIX from October 17th-25th. The show, taking place in the Blue Box, was mostly student-led, including costume and set design, sound and choreography, lights and stage management. This was the school’s first time putting together a performance designed for the Oregon Thespian festival, which is a theater competition for schools in the state.
According to the Oregon Thespian Website, the state competition is an annual gathering in April that is attended by more than 1,700 theater students and teachers from around Oregon. Some events included are workshops, one act plays, presentations and several front stage productions.
The Oregon State Thespian Festival takes place at the Salem convention center, Elsinore Theatre, the Grand Theatre and the Reed Opera House. For the past few years, many of Northwest Academy’s students have been placing in and winning individual categories at the state festival.
“I built a model of a set for the play Julius Caesar and entered it,” said senior Anna Marks. “I ended up getting 4th place. I have since entered a model of a set I designed for the play Death of a Salesman and ended up getting a perfect score.”
Each year one performance from all of Oregon’s theater programs is chosen to be shown at state as the main event. Schools take a recording of their show and submit it to the judges who evaluate the performance based on execution of the material, technique and presentation. The selected performance is chosen around February.
Performing arts teachers saw this as the perfect opportunity to design a show specifically for state, allowing the students to show their best work at another level.
“The group of seniors this year really wanted to submit something to state thespians to get put on stage there,” said Ariella Brown, Performing Arts Chair.
SIX was put together in the span of six weeks, with four summer rehearsals and three rehearsals a week once school started. A normal show at NWA takes about 12-14 weeks to assemble. For most of those involved, working on this show was quite a challenge.
“This is definitely the fastest turn around we’ve ever had for a show,” said Tech Theater teacher Tyler Buswell. “I felt the pressure on that for sure.”
In contrast to past years, individual students were in charge of designing parts of the show. Normally the costume design class creates the costumes for the shows as a group and the set is designed by Buswell. This year, costumes were designed by senior Maura Moloney and junior Henry Leeds. Senior Anna Marks designed the set with Buswell’s help and senior Sabine Hagerman was the stage manager. Seniors Gracelyn Webert, Arwyn Stech and Eli Swartley were Assistant Choreographers and senior Asher Fritts-Weeks was the Assistant Director.
“Tyler and I met over Zoom during the summer and discussed our vision for what the set would look like and worked on a Sketchup model of it,” said Marks. “The tech theater class built it during the first few months of the school year.”
SIX’s cast was made up of the six ex-wives of Henry VIII, as well as three swings— backup dancers who each understudy two queens. The musical takes place during the 16th century during Henry’s time of rule. As the 75 minute show had no intermission, all actors were required to be on stage for the entirety of the performance.
Tech week is the week before a show airs where dress rehearsals take place to clean up the last bits of the show. Tech week for SIX required the cast to stay after school every day until 9 P.M. and additionally go to Sunday rehearsals for four hours.
“It’s been a very quick process,” said sophomore Scarlett Collins, a swing in SIX. “We put this all together in a couple months… It’s a professional schedule.”
Because of this quick schedule, no freshmen were allowed to audition. All auditions happened before school ended last year. The cast is made up of two sophomores, two juniors and five seniors.
“This was a one time, special thing we wanted to try because of this group of seniors who have been in our program for a very long time and needed an extra challenge,” said Production Coordinator and director of SIX Kristen Van Sickle. “We have very advanced dancers, singers, actors, musicians, technicians and designers this year, so we wanted to give them something to really grow with.”
Reporting by Cecily Davis and Leora Mellor
Photo by Kelli Pennington
It was AMAZING!