Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My !!!! School Drama Memories

Cafe Society
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I went to see the local High School’s production of The Wizard of Oz last weekend. As someone who participated in plays for 5 of my 6 upper school years, it brought back an absolute flood of memories.

Let’s share here. Did you do plays in school? Were you onstage or backstage? What parts did you love doing? What all-time favorite memories do you have?

I was in the chorus in :Annie Get Your Gun and Pippin and Oklahoma. I had featured parts in Bye Bye Birdie ( Hugo Peabody ) and in Damn Yankees ( Joe Hardy ).

The experiences were a seminal part of my adolesence and rang in my head as I sat there watching those kids. What can compare? Having stood on hundreds of stages as a cameraman, up there making the show happen in another way and feeling that astonishing energy from tens of thousands of spectators, I have to say that nothing compares to the real deal.

Performing on some level. Acting. Getting up there and baring your soul and slipping into the skin of a character. What a wonderful thing to get to do as a teenager.

My favorite theatre story? I think it was the time I was in the 9th grade and we put on a 30-minute version of Pippin. The Bucks County Playhouse used to have a 30-minute theatre competition for Junior High School kids. If your play ran 31 minutes, you were eliminated. If you ran 32, they dropped the curtain. It was SUCH fun.

We performed that play in a few other venues. One was a pretty tough inner city high school. The stage was bare, they had no wings or flats. We just had our one magic box filled with flash paper, candles and lighter fluid, along with some light effects. As we sang the one of the songs, we looked over in horror to see flames GUSHING out of the magic box. This stood perhaps 12 feet tall by 5 feet by 5 feet.

The kids in the packed auditorium thought it was the best show they’d ever seen, and we all kept singing nervously as our two tech guys ran out, dragged the flaming box offstage and put out the fire. Some of the colored gels had caught fire and dropped into the storage area in the box, lighting the flashpaper and lighter fluid ablaze.

Undoubtedly the most interesting moment onstage that I had. :slight_smile:

Cartooniverse

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Interestingly, I was just thinking about this last night.

I had taken some responsibilities in elementary school plays. Mostly, in 5th grade, when our class (and ours alone) did Oliver the not-musical.

Though during the play itself I only did the curtain, I did a vast amount of work during production - from assisting the directors to line-reading with the actors. I was most happy, though, because I took it upon myself to research for the sets. Going through the school library, I chose old books and old art books to find buildings, settings and architecture that we later used as props and backgrounds.

In high school, my girlfriend, who’s family had always participated in productions in the district, wsa part of the light crew for every show, so I just kinda wormed my way into it. Even though I was not asked, did not ask permission, and really didn’t belong there “officially”, I became a member of the stage crew helping out and doing a lot of the lighting work.

It should be noted that we did not have high-tech equipment like many places do nowadays - the light panel was an entire 10’ wall section filled with color-coded levers. Not an easy job, but *damn * was it fun.

I even got a little thing from the school at the end of the year saying “great job.”

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My acting creditss:

Grade School: various school plays. I was the “lead” in my first grade play, playing a spaceman, the only one with two lines. Got the part because I was the only kid in my class with a space helment. I also was one of the peas in Mr. McGregor’s garden in an adaptatation of “Peter Rabbit” in 6th grade. Outside of school, I was in the kid’s chorus of Damn Yankees, singing “You’ve Gotta Have Heart.”

High school:Bye Bye Birdie (Harvey Johnson in the chorus), and The Man Who Came to Dinner (Prof. Metz). Played the Bellboy in The Still Alarm.

Post-HS: There was a youth theater organization in my home town, established after I graduated. But the plays were in the summer, so I was in The Music Man (Marcellus), South Pacific (Stewpot) and Anything Goes (Moonface Martin – the apex of my career).

College: Sheep on the Runway (bit part) and Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone (“the men” – all male walk-on roles; there were about thirty of them).

My daughter is graduating from HS this year and has been in the school musical since 4th grade. The shows were My Fair Lady, Annie Get Your Gun, The King and I, The Sound of Music, Annie, Bye Bye Birdie, The Music Man, George M!, and Grease

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My first experience with on-stage drama (well, sort of!) was a grade-school production of “HMS Pinafore,” when I was in 6th grade. I was part of the crew; the elementary school did a different Gilbert & Sullivan operetta every year, apparently (I only went there for one year, 6th grade, but the next year they did “Pirates of Penzance”). Most of the main parts were played by the 6th graders but others in lower grades were in the chorus, etc. I enjoyed being part of the backstage crew (I think I took care of the props! LOL), and we did performances at other elementary schools even.

My next brush with the stage didn’t happen until High School, where I was a member of the Drama Club. I tried out for a part in the Junior-Senior class play in the fall of my junior year and got a small speaking part! It was “A Pennant for the Kremlin,” about the Chicago White Sox being owned by a Russian (well, it was from the Cold War era, I think). However, come the nights of the play, I got very bad stage fright, and ended up breaking character on stage! :eek: Well, that was my first and last time on stage. LOL I continued to participate “behind the scenes,” though, and even later tried out for the role of Bloody Mary in South Pacific. No more on-stage roles were in the offing for me, though.

Didn’t do anything remotely resembling acting until I was invited to join a MUS* back in 1994; I really got into roleplaying in that venue (unfortunately, -too- into it!). I could express myself without having stage fright hanging over me! I had to gear down, though; the mus*ing was taking up too much of my life, so I haven’t roleplayed in a couple of years. I’ve never done any of the live RPGs, just the online, text-based ones.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it! :smiley:

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To give you a clue, there was no Drama Club at my high school. Insofar as we were organized at all, we were the Theatre Club. That would be because we never did anything remotely serious. We did one play each school year, and it was always comedy. We were on a Pink Panther kick while I was there, which meant that I did lights, sound, makeup, props, and all off-stage voices for The Pink Panther and Return of the Pink Panther. I actually got onstage my senior year to play Dr. Fassbender in The Pink Panther Strikes Again–no one could imagine casting anyone else in the “mad scientist” role.

I enjoyed doing it, but I can’t say that it had any profound effect on me. I already did a great deal of roleplaying in my gaming groups. Doing it on stage just meant that I had to raise my voice. Of course, now I LARP, and every game is a 4-8 hour exercise in improvisational acting. :smiley:

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I’ve only been in one play ever, when I was in first grade. I was a daisy. We were dressed in green shirts, green pants, and had a yellow blossomed headress. When the wind fairies ran among us we swayed back and forth. That’s it for me and the performing arts.

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Strangely enough I was talking about my HS drama expierences the other day, with my thearpist.

Zebra have previously appeared in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Huck Finn), George Washington Slept Here (evil neighbor I forget the name) Arsenic and Old Lace (Jonathan) and various parts in one act plays.

Zebra, while dragged into being drama by virture of the fact that his older brother was in drama and rather than just wait by the car decided to accept the invation to participate, did well and was cast in larger and larger roles. However during his Junior year Zebra did start working which limited his participation and during his senior year, due to other circumstances outside of drama, was chosen to be the ‘picked on’ by the ‘drama girls clique’. These castrating whores made much misery for him and still now, over 20 years later, Zebra gets the bitter taste of bile in the back of his mouth thinking about it.

Favorite moment on stage.

During Arsenic and Old Lace, at the end of the play I was arrested by the police. However the police left the stage early and left me standing on stage in handcuffs. Rather then surrrender myself to the authorites, (completly out of character) I saw that they left and dashed across the stage and while handcuffed dove out of the living room window to freedom.

The audience cheered my escape!

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Zebra, excellent improvisation!

College: General Fairfax in the musical “Little Mary Sunshine”.

HS: for the senior play, Marcellus in “The Music Man”. Other years, minor roles.

7th grade: my voice hadn’t changed and I was still a boy soprano in the church choir, so I was tapped for the role of Amahl in a local Catholic HS production of “Amahl and the Night Visitors”, a one-act opera by Giancarlo Menotti.

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In 6th grade I got to be “Miss Hannigan” in Annie. I had to tottle around on stage with a wine glass singing “Little Girls” and pretending I was drunk. In sixth grade!
I was also the evil witch in a sixth grade production of Hansel and Gretel which basically consisted of me cackling evil-y and pretending to be shoved head-first into an oven and burned alive.
And that was the extent of my school drama experience.

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Oh ! Oh ! Oh ! I forgot !!! I was the insane Preacher in Inherit The Wind. Jackie sprayed what seemed an ENTIRE can of silver Streaks and Tips into my hair, before spiking it up and out, so I’d look sufficiently “crazy”.

The humor of me, the foot-washing Jew/Quaker playing an angry Preacher who is railing against the defendant in the Scopes Monkey Trial is, of course, not lost on me…

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Joined the Drama Club in 9th grade, became a Thespian in 10th grade. Spent the majority of my 4 years in Drama as a Stage Crew Whore :p. I did construction, painting, lighting, materail gathering/purchasing/, props, and was an extra/Doody in our production of Grease my junior year.

That’s actually a semi-interesting story. I tried out and was assigned to the chorus, and Drew Franyo, got the part of Doody. I knew the whole show baskwards and forwards, 'cause my brother (after graduating from my high school) had managed to finagle a job designing the sets for the shows, plus he was an executive producer of sorts. Anyway, he was constantly playing the Cast album, so I picked up the dialogue/songs pretty quickly.

Opening night, at the end of the 1st act, Doody was supposed to leap from the convertible (Greased Lightning) to the stage floor. The only problem was that the convertible was on a 4 foot high platform, which itself was on a 6 foot platform. Doody/drew, made the jump, but broke his ankle. I will give him credit because he did finish out the show, but after the final curtain went down my brother grabbed me and brought me to a conference with the director and the dance director. I was told that I could go to the opening night party, but that I would need to be at school at 6:30 the next morning in order to learn the dance numbers. Not the most fun in the world, but I managed to do it.

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I did lots of chorus and background and one-line stuff in high school, including “Pepper” in Annie. Which was funny, because she was of course the tough orphan, and I was voted “Quietest” that year. But it was in high school that I started directing, and that’s what I love.

Favorite school play story - We were doing Julius Caesar. At the end, Cassius kills him - actually, her, this is high school - self. Her servant comes on, sees Cassius, grabs the weapon, and kills herself as well. Unfortunately, Cassius dropped the weapon off the stage as she died. The servant came on, couldn’t find the weapon, and, desperately improvising, choked herself to death. Classic.

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I was only in one play, our senior play. We did MAS*H, and I played Col. Blake.

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In ninth grade I was the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. Got to sing and everything.

The school had done the play several years earlier, and I used the same costume. The only problem was the rubber gloves - painted silver - that had never been cleaned from the last production. Wound up with a serious rash/skin fungus on my hands and forearms. Also, the silver makeup on my face led to a serious breakout of zits. I looked like something from Night of The Living Dead for a few weeks.

Never made it back to the stage after that…

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The only school plays that I was ever in were in elementary school. In fifth grade it was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. That one was a lot of fun, particularly designing and painting all of the weird machinery and such that was used as props. I didn’t have a particularly large role, but that was ok with me.

In sixth grade, however, the teacher decided early on that we would perform a play based on an atrocious children’s novel we had read called The Wish-Giver. The problem, or rather one of the many problems, was that it had only thirteen roles, most of which were tiny, and there were twenty-two kids in the class. So the teacher decided that the remaining nine people would all be narrators, each getting about one and a half lines. The production went very badly, our props were laughable, and I remember several fights breaking out during rehearsals, though I can’t recall what caused them.

I never tried to get into any plays in high school. Too time-consuming. But now that I’m in college I’m appearing as the Archbishop of York in Richard III in three weeks.

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Ha! I just got in from opening night of a production of Little Shop of Horrors at my old high school, which I am music-directing.
I’ve mostly been in pits, and my first experience firmly cemented my love of musical theatre. We did Tommy my junior year of high school. I was lead keyboards in a rock band of seven very talented kids (at least five of us are doing music semi-professionally/professionally now, as are a few of the actors). Man did that blow me away. The band was up on stage too, and we treated the whole show like a staged rock concert. And it did rock. Definitely a life-changing experience; every time I hear Won’t get Fooled Again (the last song on the pre-show music tape) or smell the sweet smell of stage smoke I get shivers.

Anyway, the following year we did Grease, which was also fun, but not nearly so profound an experience.

High school drama is such a wonderful thing, no matter how someone is involved. I know people from actors, pit musicians, crew, techies, and whatever else who have all had participation in drama change high school from a boring, cold, insensitive place to a place where they are really needed and looked to for support.

Support your local high school drama dept., go see a show today! :slight_smile:

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Woo, did four years of drama in high school. Since I can’t act and can’t sing, I did various crews and the pit band. The shows I did were The Miracle Worker, Bye Bye Birdie, Schoolhouse Rock Live, Once Upon a Mattress, and Fiddler on the Roof. In the pit band, we’d all get so bored during the spoken parts, so of course we’d chat and write perverted things about each other on signs and held them up, and tried our damndest to not laugh. I recall our sheet music to ** Victim of Gravity** got changed to C is a Victim of B’s Wild Lovemaking, Teddy, and Whip!

My dad was in a production of Our Town in high school, and he always talks about when the narrator was introducing the town and said something along the lines of “And there’s the 6 o’clock train coming right now” and he paused, and the train’s whistle was supposed to blow, but whoever was in charge of that missed his cue, so the narrator improvised with “It must be running a little late today.”