A Seussified Shakespearean Evening

Student-produced plays to debut Friday

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Cole Harvey, Staff Writer

Every year the Milford Theatre Company and the students in play production class put on two student led plays to wrap up the week of “Arts at Play in May”; which is when the entire first week of May is filled with choir, band, and theatre showcases. This year’s theme for the night of theatre is Shakespeare: Seussified, with student director Alex Lane leading his cast in “The Seussification of Romeo and Juliet” and director Emily Herman leading her cast in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Seussified.” Both shows are student-led comedies depicting some of Shakespeare’s greatests works, and students are already putting in tremendous independent work to make these productions the best they can be.

Students in play production class are tasked at the beginning of the semester with casting, rehearsing, costuming, set building, and running publicity for their own entire show. Under the supervision from the class’s teacher Ms. Weeks, students “develop useful skills like teamwork, problem solving and organization”. These passionate and driven kids take on this high workload with excitement and love what they do.

Director Emily Herman works every day with her cast running scenes and and overseeing set or costume designs for her show. “It’s a lot of work and it can be really frustrating sometimes, but working with all my friends on something we all love as much as theatre is such an amazing feeling.” Emily has played leading roles in all the main stage productions here at milford and she finishes off her high school theatre career directing this student production.

Play production class does not receive any funding from the district, so they run on a very minimal budget. This is a big challenge for set and costume designers, who need to look to places like home Salvation Army after exhausting the existing materials from previous shows here at Milford. Set designer Tyler Capra found an ingenious way to construct his idea for a ¨Suess-transformation¨ machine. “We didn’t have enough piping for my idea, so I went garage hopping in the neighborhood for pvc. You’d be surprised how much junk people are willing to give away!¨

It is fun solutions like this that highlight the ingenuity of these students; they’ll do whatever it takes to make these productions a success. At its core, this class is a community of friends who love to have fun together and perform.

The casts cannot wait to put on these shows and share all their hard work with us, so make sure to come out May 4th and 5th and give your fellow students your support.