Ithaca High School’s production of High School Musical was set to run on the 3rd, 4th and 5th of April; 7:00 pm on the 3rd and 4th, and 2:00 pm on the 5th. However, due to the latest outbreak of COVID-19, all live showings have been cancelled. For further updates, please contact margaux.deverin@icsd.k12.ny.us. The IHS Tattler team wishes the cast and crew the best of luck.
Margaux Deverin directed her first show at sixteen years old and currently serves as an English teacher at IHS for grades nine and ten, this being her second year here and sixth year teaching in total. She received her BA from Syracuse University in English and Education, and her MA at New York University in Educational Theatre for Colleges and Communities.
Vicky Lu ‘22: Last year, the student body of Ithaca High School voted for High School Musical over Fame. As the director of this year’s recreation, can you give a brief summary of the plot [of High School Musical] for people who’ve never seen it?
Margaux Deverin: Sure! High School Musical is about a group of teenagers who are all trying to find their way amid highschool woes, such as romance and navigating friendships, and trying to determine who they are as people. There are some characters who learn to see who they truly are and assert themselves as whoever they want to be, and by the end, a lot of the cliques in the high school learn to look past their differences that have been defined by “the outside” and see how much they have in common after all.
VL: After becoming a teacher, what are some parallels and differences between High School Musical and high school as it currently is?
MD: So, the version of High School Musical that we’re doing is inherently a modernized one. We’re trying to do a show that represents high school as it is in 2020, not in 2006. So high school, as it is, is a wonderful, diverse microcosm of a greater community, and in Ithaca we are working with students who feel like they no longer have to be identified by certain terminology, by a singular word, gender, sexuality. They no longer feel they need to be put into small boxes, whereas High School Musical, the movie, is really about the boxes that people are placed in all the time and how difficult it is to extend beyond those boxes. I feel like with the 2020 version that we’re creating, we’ve worked really hard to create this cast that is as reflective as possible of the IHS community so that when people see [them] upstage, they are seeing a true slice of what they see in the hallways everyday, which is a variety of people of color, which are [LGBTQ+] people, which are people who are not traditionally theatre kids playing lead roles . . . I think that it’s different in an updated sense, to reflect how IHS students want the community to see them and not placed in little boxes.
VL: I think it’s really cool how you’re “modernizing it”— as if 2006 isn’t modern. *laughs*
MD: *laughs* I mean, it kinda . . . our two romantic leads are women, and our second pair of leads, who are typically brother and sister, are both males. We’re not legally allowed to change the pronouns, but we are changing their gender expression, which is something that is way more the norm now than in 2006.
VL: Speaking of the cast, can you name some of the students who are going to be in this play?
MD: Yeah! I can probably list every single one, to be honest. Some students . . . Anna Bjerken is playing Troy, Salomay Ofori is playing Gabriella Montez, Sharpay Evans is played by Devin Coyne, Ryan Evans by Jack Cecere, Zachary O’Neill as Zeke Baylor, Yuzo Uchigasaki playing Chad, Emma Loiacono as Kelsi, Rose Fitzgerald as Ms. Darbus, and Autum Niver playing Coach Bolton . . . I think that’s all the main characters, at least.
VL: That was a lot of people! I’m sure our readers of The Tattler will recognize some of those names, at least. How’s rehearsal progressing so far? Anyone who has a friend in the musical can tell you how much of their schedule it takes up, and we can tell that they’re working hard.
MD: Rehearsal is going great, actually! We’re in the middle of staging Act Two . . . we’ve already finished Act One, which means we’ve almost finished staging the entire show and then we go back to clean and work the show until it looks and feels like how we want it to look and feel. So we’re kind of in this middle space where we’re learning a lot of things. We’re having a lot of fun at rehearsals before everything gets stressful and terrifying as “Hell Week,” as it’s called, comes up—and then we have the week of the show.
Auditions started the week right after Regents week—the last week of January—and then we’ve just been rehearsing since then. They’re right after school from 4:00 P.M. to 6:00 P.M.; I don’t like to have rehearsals any longer than two hours, if I can help it, because that’s usually all the sanity I usually have left after a school day. *laughs.* I try to be mindful of how many other obligations, be it family, homework and other extracurriculars, ‘cuz we have a lot of people who cross over from the sports world. We also have dance-only rehearsals on Saturdays, and we don’t have rehearsals on Tuesdays because I run Mock Trial then after school.
VL: How have some of the non-traditionally theatre students or newcomers reacted to learning lines or choreography (dances)?
MD: We have an excellent choreographer, Harmony Malone, who’s worked with IHS Productions for the last several years. [She] has this incredible way of teasing out moves that people don’t know they have: “If you can move, if you can walk, you can dance.” She has this great way of engaging kids—almost like tricking them *laughs*—into being good at dance, and then once they realize it’s not as hard as they think it is, then they have a ton of fun. For learning lines, I try to approach it from a theory-based perspective at first, so I start out with some sort of article and then we try out an exercise based in reading to practice actors’ physicality or gesture or posture. A lot of students don’t realize that even just walking around—when you’re walking around as you, that’s different from walking around as your character and even the inflection in your voice; your character might use it differently than you as a person does. So practicing all those little nuances really helps to make the character feel more authentic—that’s what we do in staging, as opposed to just doing what I direct you to do.
VL: Any funny anecdotes from rehearsal?
MD: Oh, goodness. The only thing I can think of right now is this musical number that the kids are obsessed with called “Cellular Fusion,” and the opening of the song on the recording is so hilarious that they never, ever stop singing it *laughs*. The entire number is just people talking on the phone: it opens with these dialing tones, and then someone says “Gabriella—” then, “Trooooyyyy—” and “What’s up? What’s going on?” It’s very meme-worthy, so now whenever kids from the musical go to greet each other, they just go straight for “Gabriella—”
VL: “Troy—”
MD: *laughs*