By Emmy Gorman
Do you like being on stage? Do you want to make friends and memories that’ll last a lifetime? If the answer to either of those questions is yes, than the BFTC, or Blue Falcon Theater Company, is for you! But wait, what if you don’t like being in the spotlight? Don’t worry, there are plenty of places for you backstage, such as being on the stage crew. However, in my personal opinion, being a “theater kid” is possibly the best thing you can do for yourself in your school career.
As an ensemble member in both last year’s spring musical and this year’s fall play, not only did I enjoy my experience, I learned a lot about what it takes to put on a great production. Some of the unsung heroes of a great production include the lighting and sound crew, the stage crew, the set designers, the prop creators, the costume designers, and certainly the ensemble. To quote Melissa Hallett, director of last year’s spring musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, she wrote in the program, “These students have to work the hardest because there isn’t anything written for them in the script. We truly had to make this stuff up! And in my opinion, they do a fabulous job.”
Do you like being on stage? Do you want to make friends and memories that’ll last a lifetime? If the answer to either of those questions is yes, than the BFTC, or Blue Falcon Theater Company, is for you! But wait, what if you don’t like being in the spotlight? Don’t worry, there are plenty of places for you backstage, such as being on the stage crew. However, in my personal opinion, being a “theater kid” is possibly the best thing you can do for yourself in your school career.
As an ensemble member in both last year’s spring musical and this year’s fall play, not only did I enjoy my experience, I learned a lot about what it takes to put on a great production. Some of the unsung heroes of a great production include the lighting and sound crew, the stage crew, the set designers, the prop creators, the costume designers, and certainly the ensemble. To quote Melissa Hallett, director of last year’s spring musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, she wrote in the program, “These students have to work the hardest because there isn’t anything written for them in the script. We truly had to make this stuff up! And in my opinion, they do a fabulous job.”
While that was the case for the Spelling Bee, in Discovering Amelia, which was the most recent fall production, there actually were stage directions and a few lines for the ensemble members. However, the directions were minimal. Each of the three ensemble members, myself included, had to make up our character’s name and personality, as well as design our own costume. I designed my character, who I named Alvina Cortes, to break a stereotype that “popular” people can be smart and like school. I made her love projects, have a lot of friends, and wear “trendy” clothes. It was actually a lot more fun than having specific directions for costume and attitude, as I could be a lot more creative. The students with named characters had very specific directions as to what to wear and how to act.
When I first got cast as an ensemble member in the Spelling Bee, I was worried that I wouldn’t make many friends in the BFTC, as I was the “new kid” and didn’t have much of a presence on stage. However, that quickly got proven wrong, as the ensemble members got treated just as fairly as the lead. All of the theater kids are my friends now, though I made a few special connections with some of them.
Another advantage of being in ensemble is a more flexible rehearsal schedule. Not only am I a theater kid and a journalist, I also dance two nights a week and play the saxophone in the middle school band. Being in the ensemble means that I’m not in every single scene, or in the case of the musical, every song. This lets me go to dance and extra help in music on the nights I’m available, and allows me to go to rehearsal on the other nights. I also looked at the script to catch up, and memorized the stage directions and few lines I had.
Being in ensemble also meant that I could fill in for someone if needed. Two days before Discovering Amelia opened, one of our cast members was sick and couldn’t make it to rehearsal. Mrs. Reynolds, our director, was worried that she wouldn’t be here for opening night, and had her partner modify the lines so one of the ensemble members wouldn’t have to memorize a lot of lines two days from opening night. Little did she know, I had practically the whole show memorized, and that is due to not being focused on a specific set of lines.
It’s always fun to get a named role in a play, and to have lines and possibly a mic. However, ensemble members are the “glue” of every successful production. If it wasn’t for us, some of the scenes wouldn’t feel “real.” From my point of view, it felt more realistic if the classroom scenes in Discovering Amelia had 10 kids in them instead of 5. Even though it is always a thrill to get a speaking part in a play, being an ensemble member is, in my opinion, much better.