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A Note From the Director...

What do you do after White Christmas brings in huge holiday crowds and Grease sells out three nights in a row? Do you double down on the holiday theme? Do you fire up another classic musical? For the 2023-2024 season, the Drama Club saw an opportunity to step outside the box and take our audience in a new direction. With both The Play That Goes Wrong and Chicago we knew that our stage would see productions unlike any of those that we had done before.

The Play That Goes Wrong might seem like a simple production to put together. A whodunnit play within a play where a few mixups cause mayhem within the play. Easy, right? The level of complexity that our students dealt with building their characters… actors who were playing other characters… in the Cornley Drama Society’s production of the Murder at Haversham Manor might just be the most challenging thing I have asked students to do on our stage. They memorized their lines and actions as the actors they were playing as well as the lines and actions of the characters that those actors were playing. It was also the most physical play we have done to date, asking our actors to dive in and out of windows, fall over, off of, and on to couches, have sword fights, and even hide inside grandfather clocks. Not to be outdone, the Stage Crew was more active than ever and yet would never be seen. The set needed to break, repeatedly, night after night. Clocks, paintings, shields, and dogs would fall from the walls. Window dressings needed to collapse. Doors were lifted straight off their hinges. The walls of the set itself needed to come crashing down in an epic and catastrophic finale. And yet, come curtain time the next day it needed to be right back to square one. I cannot ever express how impressed I am with our students for their work on the Play That Goes Wrong. I have had the joy of working with many tremendous casts and crews over the past 15 years. This production was one of the most impressive groups I have yet to work with.

If we’re talking about giving our audiences experiences they have yet to have in our theater, then this is certainly one of them. First, for years the content would have been too racy for our stage. Thankfully, Chicago: Teen Edition works to tone down some of the more questionable content and removes some of the more adult language from the script to make the show acceptable for our students. Secondly, Bob Fosse’s style of music and dance is no joke. The movements, sounds, and attitudes of his work are so meticulously crafted that absolutely everyone in the cast must be on point at all times. Thankfully, with the tremendously talented group of students we have this season, with Resa Hall as our vocal instructor, and with Chrissy Rehatchek’s choreography skills, I knew we would be well prepared to put on a great show for our audience. The Stage Crew once again found themselves with a pile of new tasks to manage. We needed a set bigger than anything built since Anything Goes, an entirely new lighting setup with remotely operated tracking lights, set pieces flying in and out, and a replica Chicago skyline. The Stage Crew made quick work of figuring out these tasks and helping us bring our show to life in a way I never would have imagined. To see sets and lighting done at this professional level on our Palmerton Stage makes me incredibly proud and thankful to have the opportunity to work with such tremendous students and staff. 

We hope you have enjoyed our 2023-2024 Drama season here in Palmerton. To our seniors in both the cast and crew, we are so thankful that you chose to spend your time with us while you were here. Your work will certainly leave a mark on your audiences, your school, and of course, your directors. We will miss you and we wish you the best of luck, wherever your path may take you. 

Until the next curtain opens......