Spotlight - Edition 4

INSIDE THIS ISSUE An exclusive interview with Imani, the director of Model Behaviour Hear about our fabulous Senior Socs speaker, Jo Finkel, the Art Director for the Barbie movie Mr Boase tells us all about the all-new lighting rig and stage flooring, recently installed in the PAC

AND MUCH MORE...

EDITOR'S NOTE Welcome to the fourth edition of 'Spotlight' - NLCS's performing arts newsletter. I'm Tammy, chair of Performing Arts Society. Theatre and the arts in general mean so much to so many people across the whole of the school and I think it's safe to say that anyone who has been in an NLCS production will agree that being part of a cast is one of the most amazing things. You meet so many new, like-minded people, have so much fun, and become like a family. Hence why I've put together this magazine, to help bring you your theatre fix.

This half-term has been a really special one because of the second-ever sixth-form production. With auditions finished in the very first week back, rehearsals were underway before you could say ‘peanuts’! And, after two super busy, chaotic weeks of jumping on tables, throwing oranges across the PAC and speed-learning lines, the cast and crew put on the most amazing show. The audience laughed, Imani and I cried, and everyone had the best time. We are so proud of everyone involved. Keep reading for all the insight about what went into making Model Behaviour such a success and what it meant to the cast and crew!

In other news, the PAC has been blessed with a revamp! The stage now has a new floor and the lighting rig new lights, courtesy of the Parents’ Guild. We were also so excited to have Jo Finkel, Art Director of (amongst other things) ‘Barbie’, talk to us in Senior Societies about her incredible career with some of the biggest film franchises. If you missed the talk, don’t worry, just read the feature inside. Congratulations to years 7 and 8 who took to the stage with this year’s ‘Glimmers’! It was an amazing show, with some incredible performances of all your favourite musical numbers, including from ‘Six’ and ‘Annie’!

Finally, we can’t wait to bring back Scripts and Snacks next half term (cue excited applause) and supporting Miss May and the cast with the poduction of The Winter’s Tale. And, Year 12, keep an eye on your emails because coming up after half term is panto season!!!

NOTICES PA Soc Scripts and Snacks starts back on FRIDAY 10TH NOV. We have some awesome sessions planned and of course lots of food and drama games. BUT EVEN MORE EXCITING, next half term we are launching MUSICAL THEATRE CLUB (timing tbc) where we will sing songs from your favourite musicals and get rehearsing for next term’s MUSICAL THEATER EVENING!!!

Year 7 and 8 Keep your eyes peeled for an exciting drama announcement after half term!

Follow us on instagram for updates, reels and photos! @nlcs.pa.soc https://instagram.com/nlcs.pa.soc?igshid=ZjE2NGZiNDQ=

DESERT ISLAND SHOWS: MRS WETTREICH Mrs Weittrich tells us about her favourite shows, songs and characters and why they have a special place in her heart.

My 3 favourite shows: 1) ‘Shockheaded Peter’ by Improbable Theatre Company. I had never seen anything like it before. It was dark, featuring puppetry and was my first experience of an abstract, stylized production. It definitely inspired my love of Physical Theatre. We are going to be taking the Year 10s to see a production of My Neighbour Totoro next year which is by the same company and also features puppetry, so I am very excited to see if this has the same impact on our students at NLCS. 2) ‘Blood Brothers’ by Willy Russell. This was the first West End Musical I had ever seen, and I loved the music, the story and the setting. It was the first time I had a hugely emotional reaction to theatre and cried at the end.

3) ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’. I know this sounds like a ‘cheesy’ choice, but I was blown away by the special effects in this production. It also used movement sequences directed by Frantic Assembly who are my favourite Physical Theatre Company so it is definitely up there as one of my favourites.

The show at the top of my theatre bucket list: I am really keen to see the immersive production of ‘Guys and Dolls’ at the Bridge Theatre. I want standing tickets so I can feel part of the experience. I’d also like to go to a midnight matinee at the Globe Theatre. I have a passion for Shakespeare and love the Globe so much. Apparently, the midnight matinees which take place at night have an incredible atmosphere. I already get goosebumps every time I am at the Globe so I imagine this would be an amazing experience.

My favourite musical theatre song: Something that makes me happy and that I can sing along to! I love anything from ‘Six’ and am also a huge Take That fan so any song from ‘Greatest Days’. I also LOVE the songs from ‘Finding Nemo the Musical’. This is a lesser-known musical based on the movie, but the music is really fantastic.

The character from any show that I'd most like to play: Nora from ‘A Dolls House’, Hedda from ‘Hedda Gabler’ or Lady Macbeth from ‘Macbeth’. Can you tell I love the classics?!

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH THE DIRECTOR OF MODEL BEHAVIOUR Imani was the director of this year’s Sixth Form Production, ‘Model Behaviour', which premiered in the PAC this term on Thursday 5th October. We interviewed her about it all!

What is Model Behaviour?

Model Behaviour is a student-run play written by Jon Brittain for the National Theatre Connections Festival. It's about a group of students in a politics class, discovering the world of Model United Nations (MUN) for the first time.

They’re learning their views on the world and how they think about politics.

How does a real MUN compare to the play?

In real MUN conferences they have multiple committees and then a general assembly. In this play, the students are discovering MUN for the very first time, so they only have 1 committee. And they don’t all have the knowledge they need to be their countries, so they’re learning how to research along the way and they make new friends because of it.

Why did you decide to do this play?

Once I found this play and realised it combined my two main passions – MUN and drama – I knew if I put the two together it would be something I would really enjoy and get a lot out of it.

What has been your favourite part of directing?

My favourite thing about directing has been getting to know everyone and forming connections within the cast and within the crew. I was friends with a lot of the cast before, but there are also a lot of people who I wasn’t friends with before because they’re in the year below or I just haven’t been able to interact with them. I also loved overseeing all of the aspects of the play, rather than just one, because I'm used to doing only tech or acting. But having to look at all of it together is really interesting for me.

What do you like about the play?

It’s actually a hilarious play. It’s so funny. Also, it’s interesting to see how young people view politics because I feel like adults sometimes have this idea that students are either really radical with their political ideas or just don’t care at all. And I feel like this play is really good at showing the niche ideas in the middle of that. And also it's just interesting if you love MUN, or if you’ve never been before and want to learn a little bit more about it.

Describe Model Behaviour in 3 words.

War, friendships, resolution.

CAST REVIEW: Model Behaviour On Monday 11th of September, I nervously walked into the white drama studio (after getting lost several times) for my audition for Model Behaviour. From the very beginning of the experience, it was nothing like I had expected – spoiler alert, it was way, way better! Being new to the school, I was questioning what I was even doing here; who did I think I was, auditioning for a play within my first full week at NLCS? However, my worries were dashed within five seconds of walking in. Imani (director) and Tammy (assistant director) were both so lovely and welcoming, and I immediately felt at home.

The first cast meetup was the Friday of that week and the cast quickly started to feel more and more like a family. Blocking started with rehearsals every short break and lunchtime, with a few after-schools thrown in for good measure, and we had managed to block the entire play by the end of the first week thanks to everyone’s commitment and focus in rehearsals. It wasn’t all work and no play, however, with a highlight from the first week including a very competitive game of ‘Zip, Zap, Boing’ with Mr. Boase, Mr. Adams and Mr. Hennelly.

Week 2 took off with our first full stagger through and the choreography of everyone’s favourite part where we got to launch paper across the stage at each other. Everyone’s stress levels were a little bit through the roof, but we were all having so much fun that it didn’t seem to matter. Sunday brought with it 5 hours of tech, fuelled by the entirety of Tesco’s (thanks Mr. Hennelly), and we raced through the cue-to-cue so quickly that we even managed a first full run-through with tech!

Show Week! We had our open dress on Tuesday night, which gave us a great confidence boost.

Then came Thursday: show day. Nerves and excitement were at an all-time high, with a Taylor/ABBA/Hamilton dance party to get everyone’s energy up. And suddenly it was 19:30 and we were in the wings, waiting for our entrance music.

The show itself was a total success, and we had the most amazing crowd that laughed in all the right places. Everyone went home on a high, and also a little of the post-show blues that comes after every performance.

Overall, I had the best time working on this show, with the loveliest cast, crew and directors I could have ever asked for.

Having just joined the school, it was the best thing I could have done to make such close friends and the atmosphere was warm and welcoming throughout – both nothing like and infinitely more than I had expected, and I only wish I could do it all over again. - Indie

Glimmers!

On Wednesday 18th October over 60 Year 7 and 8 students were involved in this year's ‘Glimmers’. With this year’s theme being musical theatre, the audience was treated to a wide range of shows. From classics like ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ and ‘Annie’ to more modern offerings like ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ and ‘Six’, the evening was a real showcase. For the Year 7s involved it was their first chance to perform in the PAC to an audience and they all excelled and had a fantastic experience.

The confidence shown by every member of the cast was electric and the audience all left the PAC with huge smiles on their faces. A special mention must go the Year 7 tech team who ran the show effortlessly and with great professionalism. It truly was a fantastic night of theatre and if what was on show is only a ‘glimmer’ of what these performers can do, then we are in for a treat as they progress through the school.

SENIOR SOCIETIES: From Batman to Barbie On Thursday 12th October, Jordana Finkel came to talk to us in Senior Societies about her career in film set design.

Jo is an award-winning Art Director with 20 years of experience in the film industry. She is the architect of the film sets, designing and overseeing huge set builds, collaborating and problem solving, turning a conceptual idea into a physical space to film in.

In her talk, she explained how she started as a runner on Casino Royale and worked up to Art Director. She talked about her work on many of the largest studio movies in the UK, including the Harry Potter, Star Wars, Batman, and Marvel series, and showed us some amazing diagrams, cardboard models and full-fledged sets that she had made. She has worked with some of the world’s leading Directors and most recently on the hit film Barbie! We got an exclusive look into how she designed and made Weird Barbie’s house, including lots of behind-the-scenes secrets. Like how Weird’s Barbie’s house contains trapdoors so that she can hide her real leg when doing the splits! And how the sky was handpainted to give the toybox effect that Barbieland has!

Jo also explained her creative process, using the example of the train from Murder on the Orient Express.

She was sent to study a steam train for two days and returned with detailed diagrams. From there, she and her team built a life-sized train, including all the details that Jo had discovered about, out of lighter, flexible materials! It was painted to look realistic and covered in fake snow. What was even more impressive was that the mountain the train travelled across was made of polystyrene!

Jo has just finished the film adaptation of the musical Wicked, in which her main project has been making the Emerald City! She couldn’t tell us any more inside secrets, but she promised that it is sure to be a fantastic movie!

We were privileged to have her here at NLCS and we hope everyone who attended the talk loved it as much as we did.

BEHIND THE SCENES: Stage Manager Hi everyone, it’s Tara, one of your local stage managers! Over the course of the the last school year, I stage-managed every production in our wonderful PAC and here are some insider tips, tricks and info on everything that goes on backstage.

When you join of our wonderful tech crew, you never quite know what you’re going to get. You could be on lighting and end up painting the set! You could be stage crew and have to make a props table! But juggling new tasks and challenges is just part of the fun. You get to be part of a wonderful team of funny and awesome people, boss around actors, skip a few form times, and wear a cool headset (that does give you a compression headache after a few hours).

Theatre tech is a vast term that encompasses so many jobs that there is something for everyone. My job as a Stage Manager is to make sure all the actors, props, and set pieces are in the right place at the right time throughout a production.

But that’s not all, and on every new production there’s something new to learn. Whether it be helping actors set up and put on mic packs, calling a lighting cue, doing a lightning-fast costume change, or raising a flag onstage. Here is a list of my top 3 unexpected things I’ve been asked to do in a production as Stage Manager: 1. Operate a dragon costume! For ‘George and the Dragon’, each night I had the very entertaining job of being one of 3 techies inside a dragon costume, hiding under fabric and holding a giant dragon head above me. It was strange having the audience see me for once!

2. Hoisting the colours! In ‘Treasure Island’, at every scene change, I would run onstage in a pirate costume and hoist a new set piece up a pulley system, be it a flag, a painting, or a pub sign! That was how I learned how pulleys worked for my physics end of year...

3. Changing the batteries of 30 mic packs in the middle of a show! On the first night ‘Legally Blonde’, over half our main characters’ mic packs started dying during Act 1. So, the rest of the crew and I were frantically running around with batteries in our hands looking for actors as they came on and offstage to change their batteries in a few seconds! It was very stressful, but not one mic died, and I finally got confident at assembling a pack.

So, I hope you learned something from this informal guide on how to break into the world of tech! The tech team can’t wait to have you. The more hands, the better! - Tara

Lights... ACTION! Over the summer break, with help from the Parents’ Guild and Estates, the PAC lighting and stage floor were given a huge update.

Theatre lighting is to many a baffling myriad of slightly different shaped things, splodging out different colours and shapes across a stage in pretty ways, all controlled by some mythical technical wizard high up in the gods of a theatre. At NLCS, students are given a view behind the curtain to figure out what does what and how. In keeping with this strand of extra-curricular education, we aim to have technologies which best reflect the world outside, for students to learn about and use. The Parents’ Guild have recently made a significant update to the lighting technology available to use in the PAC and its impacts have been felt right from the first day of term.

In order to explain the significance of this update, we need a deep dive into a little historical context and colour theory. Brace yourself. For decades, tungsten lighting fixtures have ruled the roost in theatre, using great quantities of electricity to excite the filament inside a lamp and produce a brilliant bright white light. When a piece of coloured gel is fixed in front of this, it produces the rich, vibrant colours we associate with theatre lighting. The important part of this, however, is what the white light from a tungsten lamp actually consists of – almost the full spectrum of visible light smushed together, forming a brilliant white beam from which most colours can be subtracted. This way of making colour is almost diametrically opposed to how the modern LED fixtures make light. Instead of a single filament of white light with gels to subtract unwanted colours, LEDs use a combination of single colour Light Emitting Diodes and add each colour together to create variations. .

When the first LED theatre lights came onto the market about 20 years ago, they were dismissed as gimmicky because they paled into insignificance compared to a tungsten source.

Why? Well, while on the face of it both lights could make the same colour, one added lights together while the others subtracted the bits of white light it doesn’t need. So, the tungsten lights continued to emit a wide range of light through their coloured gel, while the LEDs were just making a few spikes of light which, through some evolutionary trickery, our eye convinced us was about right.

But a light on an actor's face is the same regardless of how you make it, right? Nope. And there in was the problem with the older LEDs. Many contained just red, green and blue diodes and they just didn’t fool audiences Shows were criticised for how actors were lit, because the LEDs failed to meet audience expectations of what they thought colours should look like – rich and full, instead of artificial.

So, for a while, all LEDs were really good for was big washes of colour across the stage and tungsten retained its crown for lighting actors.

Lights... ACTION! (cont.)

However! Because of a proposed change to EU law, tungsten lighting was discovered to fall wildly short of environmental guidelines on energy consumption and something had to give. Enter the additional colours! By improving the quality of the LEDs and adding in lime, amber, cyan and other colour diodes, ingenious manufacturers began to close the gap on tungsten, and slowly the hardened eyes of theatre critics and lighting designers began to soften to the newer fixtures. Couple this with the environmental advantages and the ease of switching between colours, and fate was sealed for widespread use of tungsten lighting in theatre.

So, here we are – the future. With reliable LED fixtures now in theatres across the world, it was only right that the PAC should get involved! Our updated rig now contains 50+ LED fixtures, all with different abilities and features, allowing flexibility like we’ve never had before. Every student taking to the PAC stage from now on will feel the benefit of the changes the Parents’ Guild have made and I am immensely grateful to them. The next time you visit the PAC, take a moment to look at the richness and depth on offer from our fabulous new lights.

The floor! I almost forgot about the floor! In the two years I’ve had the pleasure of running the PAC, my biggest problem has been the floor – so scarred and tattered from years of service that it was beginning to fall to bits! The estates team finally gave in to my nagging and the old floor was removed and a brand-new floor laid in its place. We didn’t opt for a like for like replacement though, instead choosing to have a solid plywood floor permanently installed with dance floor mats we could lay over when performances required it.

So, why this approach? Partly for safety and partly for ease! The safety aspect is that scenery for many performances needs to be secured to the floor and previously this meant putting screws THROUGH our dance floor and permanently damaging it! Crazy, right? Now we can simply roll up and store the dance floor and put as many fixings into the floor as we need, keeping the scenery as safe as possible and the dance floor in pristine condition for the dancers to use. The ease relates to painting the floor. Lots of our bigger productions call for painted floors to help tell the story and, with the old stage, a whole new layer of wood was added on top to be painted, all of which took time (and a toll on my knees!). Now, we can simply paint the floor itself and once the production is finished, paint back over it. While you, dear reader and enjoyer of PAC productions, may not think this change is even worth writing about, just know my knees and the knees of future technicians will be all the better for it! - Mr Boase

NEXT HALF TERM SENIOR PRODUCTION OF THE WINTER‘S TALE The upper school has been working really hard rehearsing for the senior production and are so excited to perform on 21st, 22nd and 23rd November. Keep an eye out for tickets!

CHRISTMAS PANTO This year, we are having PANTO DAY! Year 12 will be performing an original pantomime (‘Peter Panto’) for the residents of the care home and the Junior School!

PA SOC: SCRIPTS AND SNACKS Scripts and Snacks is BACK! I know it’s been so hard to cope without us for a whole half-term, but we are back and better than ever on Friday 10th November.

PA SOC: MUSICAL THEATRE CLUB As well as Scripts and Snacks, PA Soc is SO excited for our all-new MT club! With the help of Mr Hennelly, we will be singing all your favourite show tunes and getting ready for the MT Evening in the Spring Term!

NEXT TERM Musical Theatre Evening We can't wait to bring back the much-missed Musical Theatre Evening! More information to come soon, but come along to our new Musical Theatre Club to get involved!