High School Musical

It's a bittersweet day for me. Garnet Valley's fall musical wrapped today after four shows, including a postponed Thursday night opening performance because of snow and ice that became a Sunday matinee. I watched 3 of the 4 shows, which is about the usual.

Julia did 9 shows, beginning with Les Miserables in the spring of 2014, but her run has ended. Amp has been heavily involved in costumes since the fall of 2014, but this was her first show as the official Head of Costumes, and everything on stage was designed/approved by her. I think it looks great.

This is also Grace's first musical, as she is now in 9th grade. Because of her gymnastics background, she has a role as a cheerleader and featured dancer, and is a featured tumbler.

Grace and gymnastics teammates

The number of hours that go into these shows is huge, but the end result reflects the effort. Before seeing this video, Grace told me that the feedback that they were consistently given was that they weren't doing well enough, and that they had a lot of work to do. This was a consistent theme right up until the end. As I tried to explain to her (after the fact), this was simply the director and all of the staff trying to push them to be the best they can be. Garnet Valley Performing Arts has a longstanding tradition of excellence, and this batch of kids was being pushed to hold up to that standard. Then Grace watched the following linked video with me. Her reaction was "wow, we were pretty good". Yes dear, you were pretty good. Pretty darn good. Because a dedicated group of people pushed you to be the best you could be...

Music for the show is provided by a live band of students and faculty, consisting of drums, guitar, bass and a pair of keyboards.

Lights and effects are provided by another group of dedicated students.

It takes a village, and many of the girls basketball team are...the Garnet Valley girls basketball team.

The Friday night show of the "Gold" cast has been posted on YouTube (linked here), and while the Gold cast is generally thought of as the underclassmen cast, I think the performance is pretty amazing. Go onto YouTube and search "high school musical high school" for comparison. Highlights of this show, with a bias toward scenes my Grace is in, are:

• 15:40 - the cut scene into Wildcat Cheer. At 15:50, the quadruple backflip cheerleader is Grace. This was supposed to be a double or triple, but Grace said "it was opening night and I was feeling it".
• 56:00 - The Audition scene.
• 59:00 - The lead-in to "Stick to the Status Quo", the first act finale (which starts at 1:00:20). Grace has a featured bit at 1:04:05 (the back walkover in the middle).
• 1:16:00 - Grace in Wildcat Cheer reprise.
• 1:39:30 - We're All in This Together.
• 1:42:45- Bop to the Top
• 1:46:00 - Final auditions lead-in.
• 1:49:40 - Breaking Free.
• 1:54:00 - The End.
• 1:56:00 - Finale. We're All In This Together. Grace has another short left-to-right tumbling run at ~1:56:55... After that, she is the third cheerleader from the right, just behind the Ryan Evans character (behind and to the right of him)...
• 1:59:30 - Curtain Call. Look at all the great costumes!
• 2:02:00 - The grand finale.

I can't wait to see the postings of the Garnet (upperclassmen) cast. [edit - GVHSPAA has posted all of the other shows...]

As a postscript, I would note that our production of HSM was highly regarded enough that another large local high school is taking our sets and borrowing a lot of our costumes for a production that they will be staging in the spring of 2019. So be on the lookout for Sharpay and Ryan Evans' costumes, all the girls and boys basketball teams, and the cheerleaders. I guess we will go watch that one. And I guess that means Amp did pretty good, since she is now apparently costuming other school districts as well as our own...

Great job everyone!