Throughout the weekend of Nov. 18 to Nov. 20, the Drama Club hosted this year’s fall musical, “Snatched,” in the Yamawaki Auditorium for students, faculty, and family to come and enjoy. What made this year’s fall musical even more unique was that it is an original story written by the students, as well as a total production conducted and directed by students and club leaders. The main idea for the story originated from the minds of a couple of student writers who have worked in musicals in the past, as well as having a background in storytelling and screenwriting.
One of these writers is junior radio and video production major and Drama Club member, Jennifer Frechette. The main idea for the story came to Frechette through inspiration with the concept of whodunnit plays as well as the usage of irony in storytelling. “So it’s basically like a parody of a whodunit, there’s a detective and his kind of like stupid assistants who follow him around. There’s this case that takes place in a college dorm building where a girl goes missing. So they go around to everybody and they interview everybody to try to find this missing girl and see what happened to her and there’s lots of popular music mixed in with it and it’s a fun time.”
Along with being a main writer for the musical, Frechette is also taking a role as a character in the story. “I have a role in it myself. I’m playing Avery. So that’s fun. I’m also the Music Director, so I’m overseeing all of the music. I am editing all of the tracks and I am working on everyone’s songs with them, splitting up all of the voice parts for harmonies and stuff like that. So it’s a lot of work, but it’s fun.”
On the other half of managing the production as a whole, senior and President of the Drama Club, Cassidy Phillips, talks about her role in this fall’s musical. First and foremost, there were some issues this last spring regarding what play should be done for this fall. After some discussion and a new advisor, they decided on producing their own show. Phillips stated, “For this production in particular, we really wanted it more student based. So the whole show is student-written, student-directed, student [choreographed]. So the whole process, even crew and everything is all done by students.”
This production was done in affiliation with students from Regis College’s Drama Club as well. According to Phillips, since both clubs are small, they can benefit from helping each other. While Regis has a larger theater that is typically used for the spring productions, Lasell has more students looking to get involved, so the collaboration came naturally. Overall given how well written and produced this was, one would not be able to tell they had such obstacles. This student-run play was a testament to the club members of both Lasell and Regis’ dedication to their craft, and if you got the opportunity to see Snatched live this is evident.
Comments