Week 17: Grease is the Word

The American School put on a highlights show of songs and dancing from Grease. They had hoped to put on the full show, but elected to do this smaller show largely due the lack of experience of the cast. The director is the new theater and digital media teacher at the school. She was presented with quite a few challenges when putting the production together, including an open-casting policy (everyone that tries out, gets in), field trips, limited rehearsal schedule and finding the support resources. They've decided to build on this experience and do the full show next semester.

Rebecca volunteered her talents and assisted the student director and designer to create the costumes. Rebecca also stitched the boys leather jackets and the jackets of the Pink Ladies. The largest challenge was finding the right fabrics, accessories and patterns. She was unable to find a men's jacket pattern, so the she adapted a women's pattern to use here. She also ordered the zippers, fabric and patterns from the states since she couldn't find what she needed here. Unfortunately, it took six weeks for all of the parts to arrive, and that left just 10 days to get all 9 jackets done, and each jacket took about 6-8 hours of work to sew.

Two of our kids were in the show in supporting roles and in the chorus. The director decided to use the Saturday matinee as an understudy show, which gave the younger kids the experience of performing in the lead roles. My kids really enjoyed the experience, and loved the director. I think the director did a really nice job pulling the show together. She was a good find to bring to EAB. 

Despite the challenges, the show was quite good. The kids put on three energetic and fun performances. The costumes looked nice, and even the simple set pieces were effective for this show. The kids had prepared well-enough that they were even able to perform well through technical problems with the microphones. As an audience member, I enjoyed the shows. I'm looking forward to seeing the full production.