MANISTEE — Last spring, the Manistee Middle High School drama program was gearing up for its spring production of "Beauty and the Beast." The cast and crew were eagerly anticipating putting on a show in front of a packed house.
Then COVID-19 put the kibosh on the whole operation.
"It was really disappointing," said Amanda Feyen, theater director. "I especially felt bad for our seniors because we were one week away from our performance weekend when everything got shut down last year."
Feyen wanted to make sure students had an opportunity to perform this spring, and came up with a way to put on a production while adhering to coronavirus safety guidelines and protocols.
At 7 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, the MMHS drama program will be putting on a virtual theater showcase which will be streamed on Facebook Live.
"I had a number of students reach out to me right away at the beginning of the year since we weren't able to finish our season last year. They were asking if we were going to be able to do something — what were we going to be able to do," Feyen said. "I've had the idea to do something similar to this in the spring after our normal musical as kind of a fundraiser thing anyway, so I thought I would try to do it this year with all the craziness that's going on."
The showcase will be streamed on the MMHS Theatre Facebook page at facebook.com/MMHSTheatre. Feyen said the performances will only be available live and will not remain on the page afterwards.
The performances were originally planned to take place in front of a limited audience in addition to the livestream, but eventually the decision was made to go completely virtual with COVID-19 cases on the rise.
Around 25 students will be involved in the showcase, with about 20 performing and the others serving as stage crew.
"We didn't have a huge number turn out for this," Feyen said. "Since we're not doing a traditional show like how we were going to do 'Beauty and the Beast' last year, we didn't get as much of a draw, which is OK because with COVID and everything it's nice to have smaller numbers. This is just an opportunity for kids that really wanted to do something to be able to do something."
Feyen said the showcase afforded students an opportunity to choose what they are performing.
"This gave the students a chance to kind of be a little more involved. We have students singing songs, and I gave some of them some ideas and recommendations, but for the most part they all picked their own songs," she said. "... We've been working on this since the beginning of February. We've been rehearsing after school, working on the music and the one-act play that we put together."
Amanda Harthun, director of the three-school drama program consisting of students from Bear Lake, Kaleva Norman Dickson and Onekama Consolidated Schools, said her program will not be able to put on a performance this spring. Bringing together students from three different districts would undermine cohorting efforts put in place to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus.
"COVID gathering restrictions are a large concern, as well as mixing students from other schools when we work so hard to keep them in cohorts at school," she said. "The mask requirements would make being heard, singing and acting difficult, and social distancing requirements would create a challenge backstage."
Harthun said consideration was given to putting together a virtual production with everyone performing remotely, but there were too many hurdles to leap to do so successfully.
"We did look into virtual or recording options but when we tried rehearsing last year over Zoom, the delay from our lack of high-speed internet — or even available internet — in the county made that a real challenge. The delays from different internet speeds made it almost impossible to sing as a cohesive group virtually."
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April 08, 2021 at 07:04PM
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Manistee middle, high school students to perform virtual theater showcase - Manistee News Advocate
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