Musical Revue Preview

The soft sounds of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head”, along with other musical masterpieces and Hollywood classics, will fill Dan Zollar’s Auditorium for the rest of the week with the nightly performance of this year’s Musical Revue “A Knight at the Movies”. The show starts at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, along with an afternoon matinee at 4:00 p.m. on Saturday.

Choir director Ken Foley was one of the founders of the Musical Revue, a show that the theatre and musical departments put together to give East students more showtime than just the yearly musical.

“The reason we started this Musical Revue was because we really have so much talent around here that we wanted to create another vehicle to showcase it,” Foley said. “So we decided that with a Musical Revue, if we did one every year, we would allow a bunch of students to have featured solos and small groups and stuff like that. With the musical, we have to cut the number of people to fit the cast list, which is around 50 kids. The Revue gives an opportunity to kids who may not be in the musical, whereas before they may not have been featured in any way.”

The 80 students of the cast and crew have been preparing for about a month, even though many upperclassmen actually auditioned for the show last spring. Despite the early auditions, underclassmen are not being hidden in the background of the show. Freshman only had the first week of school to audition, however many earned solos.

This performance is unlike any other at East in that there really isn’t a story or narrative pushing it along. It is just a bunch of East’s most talented and ambitious performers, singing their favorite Hollywood songs whether that be the Titanic’s “My Heart Will Go On” or a medley of the James Bond themes. Over 75 percent of the show is solos, which gives a lot of students a chance to own the spotlight for the night.

“Last year went real well, you know for the first year. Until you get something sort of established on the calender it’s hard to get people to know about it and gain a lot of crowd. But now that its on there, hopefully we’ll get better crowds this year, just cause the words gotten around that ‘Hey this is a pretty good show.’”