Godspell Rewind: SME theatre put on their first in-person on-stage performance of the year

When senior Jilli Foley read the subject line of director Tom DeFeo’s email announcing that East would be allowed to do a stage performance of “Godspell,” she immediately jumped out of her bed and called her theatre friends to celebrate.

It had been over a year since East theatre had been able to perform an on-stage performance in front of a live audience. During first semester, East theatre put on a virtual musical revue where students recorded themselves singing a song which was then all edited together and premiered on Webex, as well as an online version of the play “Animal Farm.” However, neither of the shows compared to the thrill of performing on stage in front of a live audience, according to Foley.

“[At] the virtual theatre banquet that we had last year, it was announced we would be doing ‘Something Rotten’ for our school musical this year,” senior Mazey Heim, who’s done theatre all four years of high school, said. “Everyone was so excited for it — I even bought tap shoes and started learning how to tap — so when we learned we wouldn’t be able to do it, it was [an even bigger] disappointment.”

But even after the disappointment and preparations for a year of virtual shows, the cast of “Godspell” performed their first and last in-person stage performances of the year on March 24-26. 

“Godspell” brings to the stage various musical parables from “The Gospel According to Matthew.” Jesus Christ, played by sophomore Fritz Sullivan, recruits a group of disciples and teaches them various lessons and morals through song and dance. Towards the end of the second act, the show begins to follow a heavier narrative when Jesus is betrayed by Judas and eventually crucified.

“‘Godspell’ was a welcome return to the musicals of the past, which was such a relief, for especially us seniors thinking that our final musical was just going to be, I don’t want to say a ‘throw away,’ but just not what we wanted,” Heim said.

Though the show features heavy religious themes, Heim believes that the younger audience was able to connect with the characters and understand the show as a whole — even if they may not have caught the smaller biblical references within the show. 

“‘Godspell’ focuses less on the specific occurrences in the Bible and more on the messages and the ideas and specific parables and turning them into a digestible version that people can understand,” Heim said. 

Director Brian Cappello intentionally left the setting of the show open to interpretation regarding the time period in order to emphasize that the messages are still relevant today. Although the characters dressed in 1970s inspired clothing, they also used modern day smartphones.

“The whole idea behind [the conflicting decades] was that the setting can be set anywhere because the messages are universal,” Heim said. “The whole idea was to bring stories from ‘The Bible,’ which were written so long ago, into a more understandable context for modern life. It doesn’t really have the need to be specifically set in a specific time period.”

With a smaller cast size of 15 rather than the typical 30, the ensemble played a much bigger part in this year’s musical. In most scripts, “Godspell” has a cast of only 10 ensemble members, but East’s directors decided to add five additional members. In addition, each cast member had their own character name in the program — something unusual for a musical production, according to Foley. Both Foley and Heim agree that the smaller cast size brought the ensemble closer together than in the past. 

“Sometimes with big musicals, [the cast] becomes these little cliques: the leads are one group, the ensemble is one group and the crew is one group,” Heim said. “That did not happen with this show. Every single rehearsal I saw a different group of people talking. It felt more comfortable as we were all happy to be there with each other.”

After figuring out the costumes and script, the cast had one major challenge once they were on stage, according to Foley — masks were a must.

“[Singing and dancing with masks on] took a lot of practice,” Foley said. “Our lovely costume crew sewed us these nice cloth masks, and we got them a day before the show was going to happen and they just did not work. The only ones that worked were the medical masks. Even still, we had to condition ourselves [to have] better endurance.”

Regardless of the irregular circumstances, the cast was just happy to be performing on stage.

“The ability to take an in-person bow in front of everyone brought so much energy and happiness,” Heim said. “It made going to school, even though it was hard to drag myself out of bed at 6:30 in the morning, a little bit more tolerable because I knew I was going to get to work on a show that I cared so much about after school. It was a nice return to normalcy.”