Although a musical can’t be performed in person, Bethany is staging Little Women this year. The show is based on the book Little Women, written by Louisa May Alcott in 1868. It is a coming of age story about the four March sisters: Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. They live in Civil War era Massachusetts as their father serves as a chaplain in the army.
The format for the musical this year is going to be quite a bit different. Since it can’t be performed live, and students can’t sing close to each other, a lot of inspiration was taken from movie-musicals to hopefully immerse the audience in a similar kind of theatre experience that would normally be produced.
To meet these goals, The rehearsal process was broken into two main parts, consisting of, the vocal recording of the songs, and the filming. The first half of the rehearsal process focused heavily on the vocals, and after a few weeks, they were ready to be recorded. The chapel at Bethany, which normally houses the performance of the musical, was used as a make-shift recording studio. Throughout a week, each song was recorded one by one, then mixed with the official broadway recording of the orchestration. Lines were recorded as we filmed so those didn’t need to be recorded here.
When this was finished, the rest of the time was spent blocking, learning, and perfecting the scenes. Eventually, the chapel was once again set up to record; this time with cameras instead of microphones. This production used at most five cameras at a time to make sure that every angle was covered, along with a handheld recording of each musical number.
Performing a musical in this way was difficult because the audience wasn’t there to help energize the cast. Theatre relies heavily on the energy an actor or actress gets from the audience and their stage partners. The cast had to find energy from themselves and from their stage partners alone. Along with this lack of energy, the cast had to perform any piece of their character arc at any time as the recording was organized by scene and costume changes rather than chronologically. These things together made the show more difficult to act in and made the recording sessions growing experiences for the whole cast.
The show can only be streamed at certain times because the director, Talashia Keim Yoder, still wanted it to be an event. The showing times are March 19 at 7:30 pm, March 20 at 7:30 pm, and March 21 at 3:00 pm. More information, along with ticket purchasing can be found here.