Welcome & thank you for joining us (live or virtually!) for Trumbull High School’s 2021 spring musical, WORKING. To say that this year has been a challenge would be an incredible understatement, but it has also been a year of triumphs and joys. After the disorienting and disappointing cancellation of our 2020 musical, we did not even know if we’d be able to mount a show in this unusual school year. But with the support of our administration and the THS community, and through the perseverance of our students, here we are. These kids have met challenges they never expected in their theatre careers: being temperature checked at the door of every rehearsal; singing for two hours while double-masked; staying six feet away from everyone else on stage while rehearsing or set-building; learning music through the magic of Google Meet; maintaining immaculate seating charts; perfecting the art of acting with their eyes! Through all of it, they’ve conducted themselves with humor, thoughtfulness, and aplomb.
The circumstances of the past year also required us to get super creative as a program. We had to ask ourselves the most unusual and unanticipated questions: How can we mount a production that might not generate any ticket revenue to fund its budget? How do we cast a show from people we’ve never met in person? Can those sets from BYE BYE BIRDIE really become our pieces for a new show (yes, yes they can)? Is it actually possible to stage a musical where no one touches anyone else, ever?! The answers to these questions and a dozen others required everyone to think differently, be flexible, and roll with whatever came at us every day. We are nothing if not adaptable now!
A fortunate by-product of the current global circumstances is being able to do a wonderful show that never would’ve fit our usual program requirements. Based on the best-selling book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Studs Turkel, WORKING tells the story of Americans at their jobs. It is the story of, in Mr. Turkel’s own words “the extraordinary dreams of ordinary people.” From the meaningful to the mundane, the elevating to the exhausting, these stories walk us through people’s lives on the job. You will meet those who feel like inspired artists and those who see themselves as trapped automatons. The stories and songs are, largely, taken directly from the over 100 interviews Turkel conducted in the early 1970’s. Above all else, you will discover that although perhaps “jobs are not big enough for people” they can, sometimes, show that “I did something on this earth.”
