Bye Bye Birdie!

This semester our performance project was a production Bye Bye Birdie, in which I had the pleasure of playing Kim MacAfee. This was no ordinary production of Birdie however.

 With this being a first year of a musical theater program at our school we only have studios for performing, whereas most MTP's have access to an actual theatre. So we got to do Bye Bye Birdie in one of our studio classrooms. This posed as a bit of a challenge due to limited space and no set, props, costumes, lighting, or even easy solutions for entrances and exits. 

We rose to the occasion and our reimagined presentation of Bye Bye Birdie was a success. We used minimal costume pieces and props, acting blocks for set, a lot of creativity, and we asked for audience imagination. It was quite fun. When the scene needed to be changed one of our cast members would shout blackout. The audience was instructed to close their eyes when they heard this. During the transition a "setting of the scene" would be read aloud. I know it sounds cheesy, I thought so too. But looking around the room during the "blackouts" every single person had their eyes closed. It worked quite well and turned out to be creative and a lot of fun for everyone in the room. 

 

I learned a lot while working on this project. Mostly about collaboration and trusting the process, no matter how unconventional. We all had to work together and try out lots of ideas to figure out how to best present our project. It was such a pleasure to work with so many skilled perfumers on this project. Everyone involved worked so hard and I had a lot of fun getting to play with all of them.