Tech Day 1

Today SHREK moved from NPS to NHS! It was the first time some of the students had been in the NHS auditorium, and everybody was really excited to start rehearsing "like it's the real deal." The set looks AMAZING (I'll post pictures later) and the paint job is top-notch! Big thanks to all the volunteers who have brought Farquaad's/Fiona's castle/Shrek's swamp to life!

I mainly focused on costumes today. We have awesome "Costume Moms" who organized all the outfits into alphabetical order by the child's last name, so we should not lose/misplace any items! (They are so proactive that they've already taken an inventory of all the items that Hendricken has and supplemented them with Ann's costumes. Then they picked up all the outfits and put them on hangers for each child according to his/her character(s), put the names on folders over the hangers, and made notes of any accessories still left to be purchased/borrowed.)

Ms. Miller and I started trying costumes on some of the "Dragonettes." The dresses we had for them came in just about every color and none of them looked fit for a sassy Dragonette. There was no cohesion among them because the styles were so sporadic - this one's too short, this one's too long, this one has a funny bustle, this one has ruffles, etc.). After talking to Jimmy, we decided that instead of slapping together eight totally unique dresses in lots of different colors, we should purchase eight dresses in the same style and color. One of the parents found a sparkly dress online that comes in both purple and silver, and we're going to order four purple and four silver for the Dragonettes so they all have the same look!

In addition to costuming, I took a run to buy pretzel packs for our hungry actors. My duties as associate producer, I have learned, have as much to do with taking care of the kids as they do with organizing the show.

Later in the rehearsal, I started trying costume pieces on our "Big Bad Wolf," one of the fairy tale creatures that invades Shrek's swamp. We ditched our original silky brown dress from Ann for a much more wolf-y gray coat with fur on the trim. The challenge with costuming SHREK is making human children look like recognizable fictitious creatures. Subtle touches, like the fur trim on a coat, can turn a middle school student into a wolf in no time!