Live and in-person at last

Port middle school substitutes plays for musical in show choreographed around pandemic to give students a long-awaited shot at performing in front of an audience

WEARING SPECIALLY DESIGNED, homemade singer masks, Thomas Jefferson Middle School students (from left) Jacqueline Poull, Rylie Last, Jerome Vanden Heuvel, Simon Gilhooly, Noah Batesole, Payton Wysocki and Alaina Elgin rehearsed last week in the Port Washington High School Performing Arts Center for a live, two-play show to be presented this week. Photo by Bill Schanen IV
By 
BILL SCHANEN IV
Ozaukee Press staff

The highlight of Thomas Jefferson Middle School’s performing arts program — its annual musical — isn’t a musical at all this year.

It’s a pair of plays, but more than that the show is a carefully choreographed, logistically complex, all-out effort to give students their first chance to perform for live audiences, albeit limited ones, in a year and a half.

It is, at its core, a creative attempt to provide for students, especially those who thrive on stage, the type of experience that enriches their education but has been taken away by the pandemic.

“Kids who are into athletics have still been able to play sports through all of this, but this year has been really taxing on kids in the arts,” Abby Bordak-Raaflaub, the Port Washington school’s vocal music teacher who directs the musicals or, this year, the plays, said.

Middle school students have joined their counterparts at Port Washington High School for online music performances this school year, but the plays to be performed this week will be the first live shows since schools were shuttered by Covid-19 in March 2020, unless you count an impromptu performance for a middle school teacher.

“We had our Jaguar Singers perform in the hallway for Adam Allen on his birthday,” Bordak-Raaflaub said. “We all joked that it was our first live performance in a year.

“There’s just something about that applause, that reaction from the audience, that makes performing live so special. There’s not that same hype and excitement when the performance is virtual.”  

The TJ cast will perform “Wait Wait Bo Bait” and “School Daze,” both by Lindsay Price of Theatrefolk Inc., for students on Thursday, April 29, and for family members — only two per student to limit the audience size — at 7 p.m. Friday, April 30, and 2 p.m. Saturday, May 1. 

The show can also be watched on-demand online for $5 from 2 p.m. Saturday, May 1, until 10 p.m. Monday, May 5, at www.showtix4u.com/event-details/51151.

The plays will be performed at the Port Washington High School Performing Arts Center, a venue that is key to staging a live performance during the pandemic, Bordak-Raaflaub said. 

“We’re performing in a brand new facility with lots of space and modern air-handling systems,” she said, noting that the alternative would have been the middle school cafeteria, which has a stage and doubles as a performance venue. “If we had to do this in the TJ Cafetorium, as we call it, we would have been limited to 20 kids.”

Almost everything about the performance has been planned with Covid-19 in mind, including the decision to reduce the amount of singing by staging plays rather than a musical.

“With all the restrictions and limits on singing, we decided to go a different route this year,” Bordak-Raaflaub said.

Plays also allow for only small groups of students to be on stage together at one time and allow flexibility in case some performers can’t perform because they are quarantined.

“We wanted to be able to maintain social distancing,” Bordak-Raaflaub said. “And we tried to keep the kids grouped by grade level to ensure the integrity of the show. If one group has to quarantine, we can just pull that scene.”

And performers wear masks at all times, but not just any masks. The homemade singer masks have frames made of zip ties that hold them away from the mouths of performers so they can better articulate and allow for the use of personal microphones.

“I have an army of about a dozen volunteers who have made close to 500 masks,” Bordak-Raaflaub said, adding the school’s music booster club paid for the materials.

The show is a big production not only in terms of the precautions being taken but in the number of students involved — more than 80.

“We didn’t cut a single kid who tried out,” Bordak-Raaflaub said. “And every kid has a line.

“In a musical, there are only six to 10 main characters who do all the singing.”

Rehearsals began in February, but Bordak-Raaflaub and her assistants, Beth Leiness, a private vocal and piano teacher and parent of a TJ student, and eighth-grade teacher Brianna Born, started brainstorming long before that when there was no telling what the state of the pandemic would be in spring.

“We’ve been shooting ideas around all year and finally we got to the point where we thought, ‘OK, maybe we can do this in April or May’ with the idea the kids could perform virtually if they had to,” Bordak-Raaflaub said. 

If all goes well, they will perform a show live that is different and perhaps more important than any other Bordak-Raaflaub has directed.

“This has really been an interesting challenge,” she said. “It reminds me of my first year teaching when I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.

“But to be able to do something, even if it’s different, is so important this year.”

The attitude of students suggest they agree. 

“It’s been a lot of work, but it’s been made easier by the kids who have really stepped up to take advantage of this opportunity to perform,” Bordak-Raaflaub said. 

Parents eager to see their children live on stage have also pitched in to help make sure the show goes on.

“I’ve received a lot of emails from parents who are really happy we’re trying to put something together for their kids,” Bordak-Raaflaub said. “And I have families banging down my doors to ask what they can do to help. 

“The support we’ve received has been absolutely remarkable.”

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