Photograph by George Sakkestad
Saratoga High students (clockwise, from top) Heide Cruikshank, Maren Lovgren and Nick Patton worked on independent student theatrical productions as part of their advanced drama project. Cruikshank was in charge of costumes and choreography, and was the assistant director and an actor in the musical 'The Fantasticks.' Patton directed the music and acted. Lovgren co-directed and co-produced the play 'Arsenic and Old Lace.'
'Barnum' closes, but shows must go on
Students are producing plays for class credit
By Rebecca Ray
The Saratoga High School musical Barnum ended in March. But students are still building sets. That's because seniors Kirsten Germeraad and Maren Lovgren are producing and directing a play, Arsenic and Old Lace.
They aren't the only ones. Seniors Christopher Engelking and Nick Patton directed and produced the musical The Fantasticks, which ran in early April.
Germeraad, Lovgren, Engelking and Patton are in the Drama 4 honors class, where students must perform, direct or produce a play, musical or independent film, or do a similar project.
No student had directed or produced a musical before. So Patton thought he'd be the first.
Also, after seeing a performance of Tom Jones' and Harvey Schmidt's The Fantasticks last summer, Patton fell in love with the music and story. He said he knew that producing and directing the musical was something he had to do.
Engelking came on board after a play he was producing didn't materialize. When he and Patton debated what to do for their project, Patton said that if they wanted to be daring, they could produce and direct The Fantasticks.
So they did. Patton became the musical director, while Engelking directed the actors and focused more on producing.
Lovgren thought of producing and directing Joseph Kesselring's 1941 dark slapstick comedy Arsenic and Old Lace after she saw the movie version and thought it was one of the funniest things she'd ever seen.
After Germeraad watched the movie, she and Lovgren both thought it would be a fun play to co-direct and co-produce.
"So we started going in full force and didn't look back," Lovgren said.
Arsenic and Old Lace caught the fancy of other students as well. Twenty-five students, most of whom were freshmen and sophomores and had had no acting experience, tried out for 14 parts.
Lovgren says she's had fun working one on one with the new actors and seeing her vision manifest itself onstage.
In both productions, students did everything, from costumes to lights to sound to stage-managing. Student Nicole Giannella designed both sets. And students in the tech crew class-who call themselves the "technical crüe" and help out with all the school productions-volunteered to build the sets.
Before the tech crew built the set for Arsenic and Old Lace, Germeraad and Lovgren set up lawn furniture in Lovgren's driveway and drew blocking lines--the lines that show where actors stand--with chalk.
The set for Arsenic and Old Lace takes up about one-third of the school's "Little Theater," a makeshift theater that was once part of the cafeteria. For props, Germeraad and Lovgren say they mostly "scavenged" their homes and purchased whatever they couldn't find there. To their surprise, they discovered a lot of old-fashioned furniture in Lovgren's house, which they then used for the play.
Although a film that Lovgren directed won the Saratoga Film Society's award for best picture last year, she had never directed a play. And even though Germeraad had been assistant director for productions at school, she had never directed without supervision.
As an actor, Germeraad says, she never saw the whole picture, because all actors must do is learn their lines and perform them. However, Patton says, a director must worry about much more-tickets, costumes, sets, lines, programs and advertising, to name just a few concerns.
Sometimes, Germeraad, Lovgren and Patton said, directing and producing became so overwhelming that they wondered what they had gotten themselves into.
But it always comes together in the end, Patton says, because it has to.
"It's just a great feeling to know that something you worked so hard on turned out to be so successful," he said.
Students will perform Arsenic and Old Lace on May 10 and 11 at 8 p.m. in the Little Theater. For more information, call Lovgren at 408.867.2283.
Saratoga, California Since 1955
