For musical theatre students, four years of devotion to the craft of performing arts culminate for the Musical Theatre Showcase and Senior Capstone Festival each year.
Featuring seniors Gavin Kastner, Eva Reitzig, Hannah Wylie and Grace Crews, this year’s festival on May 10 utilized various performance mediums to explore several facets of being human.
Kastner, a musical theatre major who just wrapped up another performance in the musical “The Boys from Syracuse,” kicked off the evening by putting his theatre experience to use. A selection of monologues, songs, dances and theatrical scenes from various works were included in his capstone performance.
“It’s my job to be versatile,” he said. “I have everything from a Golden age musical ... to a pop ballad you’d hear on the radio.”
Musical theatre capstones are intended to teach students how to engage with many skills, Kastner said. Because of this, he got to fill both on-stage roles and off-stage roles, such as director, scenic and costume designer, props master, music director and choreographer, he said.
Crews, a theatre arts major, took the reins from Kastner to give a presentation about her already-completed capstone. As a dance minor, Crews performed her own choreography at the Spring Dance Concert the prior weekend.
“Blocking and theatre and choreography and dance are kind of almost one in the same sometimes,” she said. “I would go into each dance rehearsal having a little bit of an idea of what I wanted to do, but I would really choreograph on the spot, because having the dancers in the room and seeing what the dancers are able to do is just something that’s super duper special.”
Crews and her team of fellow dancers performed a compilation of 12 songs centered around grief and the healing process, she said.
Her dance to a Pink Floyd song was meant to represent the process of simultaneously missing the past and navigating the present, she said.
“The healing journey is non-linear,” Crews said. “Each song is placed there purposefully to encapsulate how one day you’ll be feeling great ... then an hour or a day later you’re slunk down, back to that kind of depressive moment, because it happens to everyone. We’re not perfect.”
Her final dance was not intended to tie up the performance with a “cute little bow,” but rather offer a sense of healing, Crews said.
Wylie, the associate director for “The Boys from Syracuse,” also gave a presentation at the festival. She reflected on her experiences working with this spring’s musical theatre production.
The festival concluded with the one-act play “Constellations” directed by Eva Reitzig, a theatre arts major.
Starring Caroline Stone and Josiah Hotmire, this two-man-show was anything but simple. It demanded much time and effort from both on- and off-stage contributors.
“I know Eva has put immense, immense thought into this production and into what it’s about, and what the playwright has intended to say,” Heidi Gibson, a sophomore environmental science major and stage manager for “Constellations,” said. “You can really feel the amount of love and intentionality that has gone into it — from start to finish — from the team here, which I think is really special.”
As the play progressed, the audience witnessed various retellings of the same relationship through different universes. The through-line of the play was the couple’s conversation, which was recast and reimagined with each setting change, Gibson said.
The play was a beautiful display of people and human connection with interesting elements not typically found in other performances, and all of this resonates with audiences, she said.
