Capital Region students get peek behind the curtain

PHOTOGRAPHER: Zachary Matson

Townsend Teague, the general manager for the touring production of 'An American in Paris,' explains what goes into preparing for the show to Scotia-Glenville junior Mallory Jones.

When a new show gets to town, there’s a lot to do. A new stage is built, a new set is constructed, the lights are focused and the sounds are produced and synced. “For everyone on the stage, there are 50 more people making it happen,” Proctors CEO Philip Morris said Thursday.

And now some aspiring actors and backstage crew from high schools across the region get a chance to see what it takes.

“I’ve been acting since I was six years old, and I’ve always wondered what it takes to do a show,” Scotia-Glenville junior Mallory Jones said as she stood at the base of the Proctors stage Thursday, the organized chaos of the musical “An American in Paris” unfolding around her. “And there’s a lot more than I thought.”

Townsend Teague, the show’s general manager, explained to Jones how the crew constructs a whole new stage atop the Proctors stage, hangs massive sound towers, installs infrared cameras so stage managers can see in the dark and positions screens so actors on stage can take cues without looking into the orchestra pit.

After the stage shell is constructed, the cast and crew slowly begin to piece together the entire show – step-by-step and frame-by-frame – checking each light and sound position so that they are exactly right and then marking and locking them into place.

“This is a big part of what an actress does,” Teague told Jones on Thursday afternoon. “A lot of people are surprised by the volume of that.”

The show, which closes its 18-month Broadway run next month before launching its nationwide tour at Proctors on Oct. 14, is deep in the throes of set-up inside the Schenectady theater – and a group of high school theater buffs from schools across the region get a peek inside the production’s technical rehearsal for the next few weeks.

The high school program, dubbed Broadway Tech, invites 16 students from a dozen area high schools to Proctors each Thursday for a month. The students spend the entire day at the theater, hearing from professional actors, producers and technical crew members about how a show is produced from beginning to end. By running the program concurrent with the “An American in Paris” production, the students also have a chance to see first-hand theater professionals at work. And the month-long program culminates with the students seeing the shows final full dress rehearsal.

“There are so many wonderful jobs in the theater – most people think acting, but there are stage managers and producers and video and sound and lighting, there are incredible careers available to students interested in theater,” said Van Kaplan, an “An American in Paris” producer. “This gives them an opportunity to see behind the curtain.”

For the students, the look behind the scenes also serves as reassurance that there is life after the high school musical – and it might even pay the bills.

“I don’t meet a lot of real-time professionals that do that,” said Nina Cucinella, a Schenectady High School senior.

“And they are actually living on it,” said Maya Pomazal-Flanders, who is homeschooled in Niskayuna, with an expression of mild surprise.

The students also said the variety of jobs and opportunities and the scale of a major production opened their eyes beyond the limited range of responsibilities they are familiar with from their school productions.

“It’s wonderful to know that there are more opportunities that what they show on TV – the person that yells at actors, the person that does the lights, the person that does the sound,” Schenectady High School senior Kayla Petersen said. “If the phrase ‘it takes a village’ applies to anything it applies to the theater – but really it’s a whole city.”

Reach Gazette reporter Zachary Matson at 395-3120, [email protected] or @zacharydmatson on Twitter.