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Seussical to the stage!

Tristan Paulette '27

Jan 17, 2025

AS Musical Theatre is a new class this school year created and taught by theatre director Kelly Dowling. Dowling enumerated the goals of the class. “The goal is to produce a whole show, but they get to choose that show… they’re doing Seussical and they’ll spend basically the rest of the class putting that together with some other assignments kind of sprinkled in.”

Dowling also spoke to some of the logistical purposes of the class: “It really came out of our hope as an Arts Department that we could create opportunities for people in different times and spaces to take part in acting and productions. Obviously our PGA time is really difficult and people have to make hard choices. So we were hoping that by having this class, that if there’s someone who wants to do a musical but never has the time in the PGA, they would be able to do that.”

The class this year has started small, with a eight-person crew taking part in the Seussical performance. Fynn Poulsen ’26, one of the students in the class, said, “We’re working on blocking the show and figuring out who’s which character in what scene and how we’re gonna do the show with eight people.” Even with that struggle, Poulsen noted the benefits of a smaller group: “I like that it’s a small class, so we’re a very tight-knit [group].” William Tutt ’25, who will play Cat in the Hat during Seussical, echoed this sentiment: “It’s a great sense of community for theater because in the PGA, you meet new people and then kind of switch out. But in this, it’s like you really get to know the people.”

AS Musical Theatre has also given students the opportunity to learn the finer details of stage work. Janie Miller ’26, who will play Maizy in Seussical, stated, “We’re getting an opportunity to learn a whole bunch of the technical things that we don’t typically think about… We’re creating resumés and headshots and we’re finding classical monologues and contemporary monologues. We’re finding music for things we’re working on and We’ve also done a little bit of research on some historical aspects of musical theater through the different eras.” 

Tutt affirmed the importance of stage work knowledge, saying, “There’s a lot of work that goes into a play and we don’t have time for after school, like Stony Batter, so we have to really use our class time to specifically focus on our work. We have been looking at Shakespeare, an ASL thing, [and] we are doing some weird acting exercises, which is pretty fun.”

Dowling also expanded on her plans for the future of advanced courses in the Arts Department. “If it goes through, there’ll be a new class called AS Classical Performance, which will be a term class. That would run in opposite years so there is that [physical] space.” 

Dowling elaborated further on the struggles of advanced acting courses at Mercersburg Academy. “One of our issues with higher level classes in theater is so many of our theatre students are also our singers and dancers, and it’s really hard to get the numbers to run those upper level classes.”

Miller stated what she’s looking forward to in the play: “I’ve never really done a traveling production before so I think that’s gonna be really interesting… You have to be so smart with how you pack the vans and do all of that and just go out.” 

Tutt expressed similar hopes for the performance, saying, “I hope it will go well. I hope that we can inspire one kid to try and go for theatre.”

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