What the start of a Nashua High School North Musical is like

Let’s start off with the audition process. Our director Ms. Brianne Biastoff who is also the choir teacher and head music teacher for the Nashua school district, goes through each song in the entire musical. She will then find around 30 or so measures worth of a number from the show and copy those pages and format them into sheet music. These are called: song cuts. Once you get your cuts, which she normally gives out a week before the audition, you have to prepare it on your own. Whether you are using the off broadway song version or plunking out notes on a piano you have to learn those 30 measures before your audition date. Along with the music you receive monologues which come from the actual script of the musical. The director goes through the script and finds excerpts that she believes emphasize the main characters. You get this paper along with the rest of the audition packets. Lastly, you will get the permission form. The permission form has all the information and dates of what and when each rehearsal will happen. That form also will need to be signed by a parent or guardian. Now we get to the actual audition process. Every year the auditions take place in our auditorium. You must bring your audition packet that you received a week before. This will include you singing the audition cut in front of a panel of judges that include our director, the choir teacher at Nashua High School South and Tech director. You then act out your character line like you are performing in front of a real audience. While all of this is happening everyone else who is auditioning will be watching you in the audience. It sounds scary but it's really not, we all had a good time.

Next we have the actual process of learning the music and meeting our tech department while also understanding the true meaning of our musical. Our tech crew does so much work behind the scenes which includes “Painting all set pieces while building them all by hand” (Dakota Richardson). That is only a little bit of what our tech crew does. They also help make our props and organize them for each individual scene. But while they are doing that we have our director teaching us all of the music while telling us what Alice By Heart is. For this year's musical, our director explained the musical Alice by Heart as “A retelling of Alice in Wonderland, but it takes place in World War II in a bomb shelter during the Blitz” (Brianne Biastoff). After explaining the musical to us a little more, we dive right into our music. When we get to the first rehearsal we will get a script and all of the sheet music for every song. She will then teach all of those songs. But it’s not going to be in just one sitting. The songs normally take a month or two to learn. Because we need to learn the rhythms, the notes, and put some emotion into each song. But just because we get right into business doesn’t mean we don’t have any fun. We always joke around with each other and our director just so we can get that huge group bond. Music is more like a huge bonding experience with people you might not talk with often.

Hopeful you learned a little bit about our school musical and what the behind the scenes of our productions is like. Please do come see the shows we’ll have three total: January 16th, 17th, and the 18th. A Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. All of the people in our cast and crew put in a lot of work and dedication so please if you came it would mean a lot to all of us.