Musical Revue

Kallista Wiseman (she/her)

Editorial Team Member

Well, folks, it’s official; I don’t know what to write. 

While it might be four days before I have to turn in this blog and think of a topic, this week is show week for my school's Tenth Annual Musical Revue. Staying at school until 8-10pm on a school night for an entire week is hell, yes, but it’s fun. The memories you make are amazing—barely alive clinging to caffeinated drinks for sanity, as you run around backstage for hours at a time, trying not to miss your cues and frantically ducking out of sight when the lights come on after a scene change, and just then realizing you forgot to place that one specific rock that is just so relevant to the plot of the show amidst all the other moving pieces.

If you don’t know, a musical revue is when a theater puts on a show comprised of different songs from different musicals and movies. There is no plot, just the performance of songs everyone adores. My school gives the opportunity for this entire show to be run by dedicated students (mostly seniors and a few juniors) who have been a part of theater from the beginning. I have been a part of my school’s musical revue for the last three years, but this one is special because for my fourth and final revue, I will finally be a student director.

Each student director has the chance to direct around three songs in the review, and after a lot of deliberation, I settled on these three songs: ‘Mother Knows Best’ from the movie Tangled, God Games" from Epic: The Musical, and Some Things Never Change" from the movie Frozen 2. I chose these songs as a reflection of some of my favorite movies when I was a kid. Frozen specifically is the Disney movie I remember adoring when I was younger, singing the songs and watching the movie a million times until every word was burned into my memory. Fun fact: I can still sing most of the Frozen songs by heart.

Having this opportunity to direct these songs has honestly been a dream. I’ve been imagining this position for over a year, and I take pride in putting these songs together. I’ve also been so lucky to have plenty of talented actors, making some numbers feel effortless. Not that I haven’t faced my fair share of problems, dropouts, recasting, and sick performers, but otherwise everything has been going very smoothly, and this year (luckily) the drama that can occur within a show run by teenagers is at a minimum, thank goodness. 

I was nervous about rehearsals initially just because while I can do staging, blocking, and all the set stuff as a member of the backstage crew since my freshman year, I’m not very knowledgeable when it comes to vocals. As I started rehearsals, however (of which we get two for each number before show week), I realized that a lot of the memorization and smaller fine-tuning is figured out by the actors themselves as they work to memorize and perfect the song in their free time outside of rehearsal since there isn’t enough time to work on each number every day to perfect it. Not that this strategy doesn’t work because the majority of actors have amazing voices already and their experience in past shows helps them understand everything they need to be doing to sound amazing without a director hovering above them every step of the way.

This experience has been everything I dreamed of and everything I haven’t. The good, the bad, and everything in between has taught me a lot about myself as a leader to my peers and as a follower just trying to make my way through this show. Anyway, wish me luck, and to everyone: break a leg!