A little taste of the New York theatre scene is making its Searcy debut this weekend in the form of Spring Sing 2017: \u201cCurtain Up!\u201d<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s opening number, an adaptation of \u201cBigger\u201d from the 2013 Tony Awards, reminds us that there is a\u00a0\u201ckid in the middle of nowhere sitting there living for Tony performances\u00a0\u2026 So we might reassure that kid, and do something to\u00a0spur that kid,\u00a0\u2018cause I promise you all of us up here tonight: we were that kid.\u201d In fact, senior\u00a0Delta Gamma Rho club show director\u00a0Caroline Nelson was that kid \u2014 except\u00a0she was living for Spring Sing performances, even before becoming a Harding student.<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember when I first saw Spring Sing, I was on the fence about coming to Harding,\u201d Nelson said.\u00a0\u201cBut they had fire and confetti and more people than you could count on the stage, and I just said, \u2018Whoa. OK, this is interesting.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Theatre professor and Spring Sing set designer Ben Jones said he had a similar experience the first time he was involved in Spring Sing as an ensemble performer\u00a0in 1994.<\/p>\n
\u201cI will never forget what it felt like to hit the final pose of the finale,\u201d Jones said.\u00a0\u201cWe were all around the hosts and the hostesses, and I happened to be one of the ones kneeling down right in front doing jazz hands and all that junk\u00a0\u2026 And what people don\u2019t understand is that the sound of 4,000\u00a0people clapping, I mean,\u00a0you can feel that. Not just hear it, you can actually\u00a0feel the applause. That changed me.\u201d<\/p>\n
The theme this year, according to director Steven Frye, celebrates the impact Broadway theater\u00a0has\u00a0had on generations both past and present. For freshman theatre major and ensemble performer Ava Galyean, whose mother traveled with a touring show of\u00a0\u201cShenandoah\u201d\u00a0and was involved in various cabarets around New York City, theatre has been an important part of her life right from the start.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have home videos of me in our New York apartment singing songs from\u00a0\u2018Cats’ and dressing up as Dorothy from \u2018The Wizard of Oz\u2019 for Halloween,\u201d Galyean said.<\/p>\n
The beauty of Broadway in particular, Galyean said, is that the stories remain relatable over many generations.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs art and society and times change, so does our music and taste, and that\u2019s reflected in our most popular Broadway musicals,\u201d Galyean said.\u00a0\u201cShows like\u00a0\u2018Hamilton,\u2019 \u2018Dear Evan Hansen\u2019 and\u00a0\u2018Waitress\u2019 are all very modern in style of music and so different from classics like\u00a0\u2018Oklahoma,\u2019 \u2018Annie Get Your Gun,\u2019 or\u00a0\u2018Carousel.\u2019 But they all have great stories everyone can listen and relate to in some way.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to Steve Frye, \u201cCurtain Up!\u201d is a party in the Benson with 1,000 of his closest friends. This year, the Broadway-themed ensemble numbers are interspersed with\u00a0club performances ranging in content from the secret backstory\u00a0of Chick-Fil-A\u2019s\u00a0bovine mascot to the stock market crash of 1929. Despite the variety of subject matter, freshman Iota Chi women\u2019s club performer\u00a0Sydney Sanford said that the magic of theatre is that it\u00a0tells stories from the past, present and future, and it is not stuck to any rules of how it should be done.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur Spring Sing show,\u00a0\u2018Women of World War II,\u2019 has been highly influenced by the musical \u2018Newsies,\u2019\u201d Sanford said.\u00a0\u201cThose boys were strong and fought for what they wanted\u00a0\u2026\u00a0Our characters are the women who ran America while the men were gone in World War II, who\u00a0wanted to show the rest of the world that we are strong enough to fight for what we want and to take care of who we love.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to Sanford, the stories told in Spring Sing \u2014 and in live performances everywhere \u2014\u00a0always have a sense of real life to them, no matter how bizarre they are.<\/p>\n
Nelson said the first show she ever saw on Broadway was\u00a0\u201cThe Little Mermaid.\u201d After leaving the theater, this 14-year-old girl\u00a0knew she would never be the same.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew I wanted to tell a story, and I knew I wanted to make people feel things,\u201d Nelson said.\u00a0\u201cI knew I\u00a0wanted to be part of an extravagant number that has people’s jaws on the floor wondering, \u2018How did they do that?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
There are infinite ways to tell a story, according to Nelson, and every Broadway story \u2014 as well as every Spring Sing story \u2014 is wonderful and beautiful in its own way.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy 15-year-old sister never really listened to showtunes until\u00a0\u2018Hamilton\u2019 came around,\u201d Nelson said.\u00a0\u201cNow, she knows literally almost every word to every song. As long as there are stories to tell, now moving towards fresh and relevant ways, theater and Broadway will always thrive.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A little taste of the New York theatre scene is making its Searcy debut this weekend in the form of Spring Sing 2017: \u201cCurtain Up!\u201d This year\u2019s opening number, an…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15066,"featured_media":8689,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[136],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lifestyle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15066"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8688"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8690,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8688\/revisions\/8690"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}