A showing of “Frozen” will be premiering this November having numerous special effects like fog and snow machines, projections, and colorful lights.
Over the past year, our theater students have been working on the “Frozen” musical. It started when they obtained the rights to “Frozen” after the United States of Frozen competition. The school was able to win and got permission to use Frozen characters and music.
“The lighting system we use daily, it’s really cool you can have multiple different colors on at the same time compared to the old lighting system which was pretty horrible,” senior Alison Gardner said. “It takes a lot of time to design effects and also the timing, people who are in the; live booth, sound booth, and running projections have limited time to execute an action. Props are in an actor’s hands, unlike effects given to the crew.”
The school is the first to do this version of “Frozen” but it is also one of the most coordinated and technical musicals that the school will do. This can bring the school into a new age of musicals.
“This is definitely one of the biggest shows we have done at Millard West so I don’t think we have any intentions to go bigger for a couple of years,” junior Daiten Gubbels said. “I work with the props and the set but it is one of the most complex sets we have done here.”
The new improvements to the theater include hanging the new lights and fog/snow machines to make the experience more interactive.
“We haven’t received the advanced stuff for the fog/snow machine but once we do get them we’ll put them up in the grid where the lights are,” sophomore Spence Hinds said. “It’s going to be a super unique and engaging experience.”
That isn’t the only performance-related news because sometime next summer the smaller black box theater will be receiving a similar change to the main theater. These changes will not be as expensive as the main theater renovations but will allow for some other plays to be performed in the black box. The musical will shown on November fifth at 2:00 pm and currently, the final preparations are coordinating and line memorization.
