“Come on, Wildcats!” “Getch ya head in the game!” Performers sang and danced in excitement as they portrayed characters from “High School Musical” on Nov. 2-4 and 10-11. Actors enjoyed many fun moments on and off stage.
The jocks had a particularly active role with their basketball choreography.
Junior Aubrey Wilson, who played a jock/cheerleader, said that she wasn’t good at dribbling a basketball. “I learned as we went, but I still lost the ball here and there,” Wilson said. “I had to figure out how to roll a ball through my legs and around my body, and a lot of times it got lost and went into the pit.”
Freshman Eli Shipley wore a Wildcat mascot costume. During one performance, Shipley, wearing a mascot head and oversized paws, didn’t see the edge of the set, fell off of the edge, and dangled from the backside of the set piece.
“I’ve been like the most injured person at musical,” Shipley said with a smile.
The crew also joined in on the fun as they knew most of the musical’s choreography and the song lyrics.
“There was a lot of singing and dancing going on with the crew,” Shipley said. “We all knew the full show in and out. One of the best numbers to dance to was ‘We’re All in This Together,’ and another one was ‘Bop to the Top.’”
Shipley said that behind the curtain, the crew members would salsa and form dance lines to the songs and dance along with the cast.
A lot of the cast took their own creative liberties with their characters.
Senior Maggie Millenkamp said that she made Gabriella more outgoing than she was in the actual movie.
“I added that she kind of had more of a sense of humor and more common sense than in the movie,” Millenkamp said.
Millenkamp said that she and Michael Kephart (11), who played Zeke, would perform a special handshake before the show as a “ritual for having a good performance.”
“Another thing we would do before every start of the show is we’d always run the first dance because someone would always forget it,” Millenkamp said. “Then we’d laugh afterward because someone would always mess it up.”
During the performances, extras Noelle Bardgett (12) and Audrey Jolley (12) slipped in their own bits of fun and entertainment while the main actors were acting out a scene upstage. In one scene Jolley pantomimed a fake fight with Bardgett. “We liked to pick something different each time to do,” Jolley said.
In another scene, Bardgett proposed to Jolley. “I thought it was boring to not do anything in that scene, so I just proposed,” Bardgett said. “After that, it just kind of became a thing we did.”
