Preface & A look into the Cherry Creek High School Technical Theatre program as I found it and as I left it. My time in this theatre was rather short lived. I joined in the Fall of 2011 after attending all of both the main stage and student directed shows the year before. My first show was a
“modernized”, as it was, version of Shakespeare’s
Much Ado about Nothing
. Followed almost immediately by the first ever costudent directed main stage production of
Alice in
Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass. That same season, I was coconstruction head with
Olivia Barrett, a 10Star Thespian and twotime Stage Manager by her graduation, for the
Spring Musical
The Drowsy Chaperone. That year, there were three different spring shows.
The 25th Annual Putnam Country Spelling
Bee featured a cast of mostly seniors as perhaps one last opportunity to be in a high school musical.
This is a Test was made up of most everybody else but most notably featured upcoming sophomores that would assume lead roles the next year.
Battle at Little Creek was a play (with music) that was written by our director, Mark Devine, to be performed in Scotland that summer and was essentially written to the characters cast, those being the few students who dropped seven grand to go to Scotland. It was a good idea at heart
, to have so many shows to give all of these different people chances to perform. However, what was overlooked was that the same construction crew, weakened as always in the spring, would have to build three different sets. This was the nature of tech theatre at Creek as I found it.
Administration
I came into the theatre in a time under the direction of Mark Devine, an previously successful actor turned teacher, during the hiatus of Dr. T.J. Donahue. During my two years, Pam
Matthews, a previous theatre director from herself now working in the ELA department at
Cherry Creek, was the Technical Director. After a great graduation of strong Technical
Students in the Spring of 2011, Few were left to run the crews. With construction in the greatest need of both sheer manpower and wits, a tech theatre graduate, Piotr Giabola, was hired as well as Sally Millian, a previous theatre volunteer now working across the street for the district. The single greatest problem facing this theatre was a strong lack of communication on every front. People were not talking to each other. The tech students and actors were communicating better, but still strongly misunderstood one another, the stage managers were not communicating with tech effectively, there was little to no communications between
Director and Tech Director as to what the set should look like, and the theatre as a whole was not communicating with the rest of the school.
It was these barriers that we set to break when an organized mission to
