By Margaret Mattes, Princeton High School
Opening the doors of the Performing Arts Center at Princeton High School exactly one week before the debut of the spring musical, The Boy Friend, I quickly discover that the jazzy notes, “swell” vocabulary, and wild Charleston moves of the twenties are alive and well. On stage, the student stage manager and director discuss the exact placement of hatboxes on the Victorian couches, while the orchestra is led through the same four opening measures about one hundred times, and the lights on the stage swiftly switch from green to purple to pink. And then, slightly off schedule, the mics are turned on and the show, if only a rough run-through, begins.
Although junior Lizzie Karnaukh, a member of the play’s chorus, insists that her favorite part is “right now, putting it all together for the first time” with the orchestra, costumes, scenery, and entire cast, the process of this year’s spring musical began, in fact, last year. Patricia Wray, PHS’ drama teacher, planned out the Depression-era Arthur Miller drama The American Clock as the fall play, to be followed in the spring by Sandy Wilson’s light-hearted musical The Boy Friend, set on the French Riviera during the Roaring Twenties. But, because of personal reasons, Wray was unable to direct the production last spring and so had to wait until this season to “have that closure” concerning this particular time period.
Auditions for the production took place almost two and a half months ago, just the week after winter break, and, while all students who participate in the drama program are assured a part in one of the fall productions, such is not the case with the spring musical. Indeed, these three-part auditions, singing, acting, and dancing, may have been especially important this year since, according to senior Samantha Itkoff, who plays the overly dramatic, somewhat needy Lady Brockhurst and has been involved in the musical since freshmen year, “this musical has the most dance numbers out of any [production] we have ever done” and this, therefore, is one of the greatest challenges of the play.
Karnaukh, who has been a student at the Princeton Ballet School for eight years, agrees, “the problem is coordinating everybody and really getting it all together and putting it out as a team effort because as long as you have one person who is not totally there, the team effort kind of goes to waste.”
And while this may be the trickiest part, it is certainly not the only demanding element of the performance, which truly requires all of the actors to become triple-threats with acting, singing, and dancing. Such a formidable challenge may certainly deter the less daring, or perhaps the less humorous, but it this very “experience of combining the abilities to sing, dance, and act [that] sort of lured me in,” commented junior Milosh Popovic, “it’s a challenge but if you work hard at it, you eventually start to pick it up and it becomes satisfying.” Popovic noted that his favorite part of participating is experimenting with his character, Lord Brockhurst, a “flirtatious, sort of creepy, perverted man,” who Popovic sees as his exact opposite.
But the effort and time commitment extend far beyond those who the audience will actually see on opening night.
Senior Shannon Dean, the musical’s stage manager, who has been involved with the school’s for four years and shadowed the previous stage manager for over a year, can think of about seventy individuals involved in the actual production of the play, not including those who have helped out creating sets or brainstormed ideas. “Effectively,” Dean says, “it’s all student made” which contributes to the “amount of energy that goes on backstage that you can’t get anywhere else really.”
For freshmen Jacob Van Buren, who is helping out behind the scenes with lights, the experience is novel. Coming from John Witherspoon Middle School, where “everything was a lot more fixed,” the high school provides much more complex and varied opportunities with “a lot more cues, lots more lights, [and] many things more student controlled.”
Many member of the high school’s orchestra, which accompanies the performance, are also forced to step outside of their comfort zone by the production, as they do not often play to accompany other art forms, such as dancing and singing. “It’s definitely more difficult because sometimes you don’t follow the direct script because the choreographer changes things or cuts things or slows things down, and so it’s not the same tempo the whole time,” commented junior Vinita Su.
And this process of learning by doing may be exactly what Wray is looking for, “I’m not a Broadway producer; this is not a professional theater and so it should be about the educational value of the piece. That’s my major objective so that it’s not just putting on a show; it’s that they’re learning something new.” For the first time this year, she and Robert Loughran, the high school’s orchestra director, created a study guide concerning the time period of the musical for those students involved.
The educational value of the performance is further enhanced by the involvement of Michael Kubala as choreographer. Kubala, who has worked on Broadway for many years with artists such as Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse, became involved with the school’s musical when a temporary injury gave him some free time and Wray, a personal friend from their days dancing together, asked him if he had time for a small choreographing project while recovering. Ever since, he has proven an integral part of the annual musical’s success. “It’s really good for kids to work with these people because it raises the level of what’s around them, and hopefully the level of what they’re doing,” adds Wray.
And Dean is certain that all of this commitment will show on opening night, “with every show, we are always panicking and then, once we get to the show, we’re like ‘it’s great,’ but this is the first time, early on, I said no, I think this is exactly where we need to be right now, this is going to be a great show. This one’s going to be great.”
Princeton High School’s spring musical, The Boy Friend, will be performed at the Performing Arts Center at PHS on Wednesday, March 30 at 7:30 p.m. and on Friday, March 31, and Saturday, April 1, at 8:00 p.m. Tickets are available for purchase before each show, $7 for students and seniors, and $12 for adults.

