Allan Appel Photo
Montana Telman as Georgia Hendricks, leading the dancers.
Nearly three dozen actors, 20 student musicians, 12 techies, and a new all-student dramaturgy team have created a murder board in the lobby of Co-op High.
A murder board is a good thing. It’s all part of the school’s presentation of Curtains, a charming play-within-a-play backstage murder mystery musical comedy, as its all-school spring show.
The show runs today through Friday, March 25, 26, and 27, at 7 p.m., with a Friday matinee at 2:30 p.m., and the public is welcome.
It’s the biggest cast a Co-op High show has had, the largest number of student musicians, and the most song numbers and dance sequences. And it’s the first time the entire show is student stage-managed, said Rob Esposito, the long-time director at the school’s drama department. This is his 32nd show.
In the foreground, Kristyn Colofati as Bambi and Christian Ayala as the play’s producer, Bernstein.
“We were really ready to step it up and challenge ourselves,” said Esposito on Tuesday afternoon during a tech rehearsal. “This is a wonderful opportunity to work with all their gifts, and to showcase who we are as an artistic community.”
Those gifts include, for the first time, students running the lights and set design (with supervision).
The dramaturgy team is also all student-run for the first time. Instead of Esposito answering the actors’ questions about their characters, the dramaturgy team researched the era and context of the play — 1959 in the Boston police department — and produced a brochure to help the actors with style, accents, and other aspects of character study.
They also produced the aforementioned murder board, of the kind detectives might use to help solve a crime.
The board, complete with photos of suspects and plastic baggies of evidence, is in the Crown Street lobby of the school. Playgoers will have a chance to vote on who they think committed the crime — who killed the lead actress in the play within a play in Curtains — by depositing their ballots during the show’s intermission.
Esposito said one of the special pleasures of this production has been working with so many kids, including many freshmen and many without formal training as singers or dancers.
It has also been an all-hands on deck effort to catch up from many snow-caused cancelled rehearsals. “Ask anyone who’s putting on a show,” said Esposito, and you’ll be told what a huge problem the bad weather has been. “Conservatively, we lost 12 to 16 hours of rehearsal, including a a six-hour tech rehearsal that was recently cancelled due to the weather,” he said.
Still, at the run-through, the kids were singing with brio and dancing with energy, as the tech crew adjusted the sound for the different voices of each actor.
It sure seemed like they’d overcome adversity and the show would not only go on, but do so with panache — and some pretty good Boston police accents.
Curtains runs at Co-op Arts & Humanities High School, 177 College St., today through Friday, March 25, 26, and 27, at 7 p.m., with a Friday matinee at 2:30 p.m.
