It takes a very large village to put on a musical! This is especially true when your cast and crew are 3rd through 5th graders and each company member has a small team supporting them.
We can't thank the City of Saratoga and our local community theater -- South Bay Music Theater -- enough for making this professional theater an option for our kids. Our Foothill stage is lovely, but it isn't big enough for our cast and our MPR isn't built for good sound. In fact, when Foothill was built they made a cost-saving measure to remove the backstage from the plans -- so there isn't anywhere backstage for our Foothill kids to be. Not only does being able to use our local Saratoga theater give us the room we need to actually do our show, but it gives our kids an opportunity and experiences that they will remember forever. We are so surprised when our families tell us that they haven't visited our Saratoga Civic Theater before. Both of our local community theater companies, South Bay Musical Theater (https://southbaymt.com/) and West Valley Light Opera (https://www.wvlo.org/) are FABULOUS and we encourage you to support our local arts.
Thank you so much to our Foothill school teachers and staff, who have been so encouraging all along and every year. Our students come to us curious and happy to learn and they know how to pay attention. They already have a strong music background. (Thank you SEF!!!) Another thank you to Saratoga Theatre Arts, our school theatre booster organization.
A HUGE thank you to our Foothill PTA, who are our producers, financial backers, and cheerleaders. In order of cost from largest to smallest: facility rental, sound and lighting design, music production and direction, licensing, choreography, costumes, and props, teeshirts and a small celebration -- a musical costs $25,000 to $30,000 dollars! It takes courage to agree to embark on this journey for our kids. We only recoup $8,000 to $11,000 of those dollars back from ticket sales, the rest comes from parent donations up front.
In fact, the only reason we can keep these costs as low as they are is that we have an army of volunteers to help. A SPECIAL thank you to Set Manager volunteers Lauren and Jimmy Wong, who were at almost every rehearsal (even changing their work schedules!!) to help our build and stage crew create our sets and props. Many of our other costume, supervision, and tickets volunteer parents have put in 10-50 hours helping us get to where we are today. This effort would NOT be possible without them. ALL of our families have put in time helping our students to learn their lines, carting them back and forth from rehearsal, reading and marking calendars from long emails . . . . and probably listening to more 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang' music than you wanted to!!
Additional sound effects are courtesy several royalty-free sound effects sites . . . .
Pixabay: bike-passing-by-84486, fx-comedy-marching-78276, toot-comedy-flute-144564, vintage-phone-ringing-121778, phonehangup.mp3, ChittysStartingMod.mp3, backfire-87805.mp3, inflating-balloon-35969.mp3,
Orange Free Sounds: Trumpet-charge-fanfare-in-minor-key.mp3, ChittysHornOld.mp3, Bomb-explosion-sound-effect.mp3, RocketLaunch.mp3
All backdrops created by Ms. Davies using DALL-E 2.
