Behind the scenes of the school musical: All about stage crew

“Papa!” Chava calls from the rounded stage of the lecture hall as the scene ends and the lights fade, while the actors rush off stage. Four or five students scurry on the stage with props for the next scene. Music plays from the speakers on the sides of the stage. The lights go up, and the actors begin the next scene.

When you hear about a musical or play, the first thing you think of are the actors, but much more goes on behind the set. Without the stage crew, no play would be complete.

This year at Rachel Carson, the student musical is “Fiddler on the Roof Jr.” A group of about 25 students called the Stage Crew run all of the behind the stage action They run everything the actors can’t accomplish on stage. There are several different sections of Stage Crew, such as lighting, costume, makeup, sound  and props. Each of these groups are responsible for controlling different parts of the musical.

“I was a little disappointed, but I was also happy to be on stage crew and not have to deal with the nerves of being on stage,” Andie Miller, a seventh grader on Majestics said.

Stage crew is extremely important in the production and flow of the musical. Without the crew, there would be no lights, props, or sounds in the production

Shreya Chandran, an eighth-grader on Dolphins team, said that without the stage crew, “the musical would be boring,” and it would probably fall apart. She is on sound crew and is responsible for putting microphones on the main leads before the show and timing the sound effect for a broken glass after the wedding scene.

Shreya chose to work on Stage Crew because she was on Stage Crew last year, during Carson’s production of “Once on This Island Jr.”

“It’s fun, but it a slow job… I guess it’s a lot of responsibility,” Shreya said about being on the crew. She says the most stressful part of her job is when Motel steps on the glass during the wedding and she has to time the sound right. “It’s so stressful.”

Although Stage Crew can be difficult at times, Shreya says that Stage Crew is useful because she’s learned a lot about responsibility and how to distribute jobs, and the best part is that she gets to see how the musical improves over time for free.

All of the students in the crew are self-signed up, choosing to participate for several different reasons.

Some signed up because they didn’t want to be on stage in the musical.

“I didn’t want to act, but I still wanted to be a part of the musical,” said Osakiodeme Ikhnmwin, a seventh-grader on Legacy.

Others chose to sign up because they didn’t quite make it into the play.

“I wanted to be part of the play any way I could. If I didn’t make the play, I wanted to be backstage,” said Andie.

Andie works on lighting. She and a few others are responsible for lighting, two spotlights that are direct facing, and different colors and backgrounds.

Her job is important because without it the musical wouldn’t be the same. “Without the lights it would be completely dark. We also add different lights and fades to make it more interesting,” Andie said.

Andie says her favorite memory from stage crew was her first day there, “On the first day, I got to play with the spotlight, and I felt like a little kid playing with a toy,” Andie said.

Her favorite part about Stage Crew is being able to meet new people and gain new friends. She thinks that on Stage Crew she’s gained more new friends than she would have if she were part of the cast.

Although Andie agrees that Stage Crew is a blast, it can also be stressful at times. She says that at the points where she has to follow someone with a spotlight, it is stressful to keep her hands from shaking.

“I’m not a really relaxed person. When the spotlight’s on someone, it shakes a lot, so I have to keep my hands firm.”

All this hard work and stress, however, pays off in the end, when the cast and crew overcome all of their difficulties and are able to put on the final performances of the show. The cast has been working hard for over 16 weeks on the play, and the stage crew all seem to agree that they’ve come a long way.

“I think they’re doing really well, considering they’re a bunch of seventh- and eighth-graders, and they have to deal with nerves of being on stage,” Andie said. “I think the show went really, really well. There was some technical issues with sound and lights, but everything else went really smoothly.”