Original Musical Replaces the Traditional Fall Musical

There will be a fall musical but it will be different than any other musicals put on in the past; it will be an original musical written by the HUHS musical production staff.

This year the musical will not be a live performance but instead a movie style, as it will be filmed. The musical will be based on retelling the story of Pandora’s Box. To avoid copyright issues the musical production team has created an original script and Ernie Brusubardis will be either adapting or writing the music as well.

“The pandemic has offered a lot of challenges for the performing arts and we are responding to them as safely and creatively as possible,” musical director Andrea Moser said.

The musical production staff plans on having filming days on the weekends and pre recording some of the music but there is no official practice schedule yet.

“The idea is to be flexible and rehearse parts of the show at different times so that we can, for instance, focus on the beginning and then once that’s done focus on the next part,” Brusubardis said.

This year the practices will consist of virtual preparation, small group rehearsals, and filming days. The rehearsals in groups most of the time will not have the whole cast together. The choir room can fit about 30 people distanced and that is about how many members in the cast.

Another change was auditioning for this year’s musical. Auditioning was offered both virtual or in-person to accommodate with students who were quarantined.

“I believe the audition process went smoothly and was very organized. I wouldn’t be opposed to having auditions run this way moving forward,” Connor Martin said.

Martin is playing lead role Prometheus in the musical this year. There were audition groups of 10 that had their own time frame but one of the biggest differences was learning the dance.

In previous years people auditioning would be taught the dance during the audition. However, this year they learned the choreography a few days in advance of their audition.

An original musical was not always in the plan for this year. The musical production staff was planning on producing Xanadu, which is a comedic show that has some relation to Greek mythology. After canceling the rights to Xanadu the production team had found the story of Pandora’s Box.

“The storyline of that myth is that the God, Zeus, created Pandora to punish mankind by giving her box full of all of the troubles of the world… which she opened. Nothing could be more 2020 than that, so we went with it,” Moser said.