FORGOTTEN VOICES:
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An Original Movie Musical
ecessity breeds invention, and in the case of theatre arts at San Domenico, a pandemic lockdown and social distancing requirements led to the creation of a beautiful and timely movie musical. Written by Upper School students, Director of Theatre Arts Erica Smith, and guest composer Phil Schroeder, Forgotten Voices is a powerful and entertaining portrayal of diverse and little-known voices from Marin County's past: the Chinese immigrants detained on Angel Island, the last of the villagers at China Camp, and white society members in San Rafael in the early 20th century. While researching and writing the film, students explored these stories in light of Black Lives Matter protests and their own voices and feelings, also somewhat “forgotten and silenced" by the pandemic. Marlena High, a core writer and co-stage manager for the project, began work on it during her senior year and shot about 75 percent of the film herself. “She's
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the one who came up with the idea of using a digital editing technique – called, ironically, masking – to work around COVID-19 health requirements,” says Smith. “The crew would film interior scenes with just one actor, then another, and so on, then merge the footage to make it appear the actors were together in the same room. Marlena also single-handedly created the website for the movie and edited much of the film over the summer.” Behind the scenes are even more stories of interest. “The character Ming Yue is the wife of a Chinese man who is detained on Angel Island. She’s stuck back in China, waiting for him,” Smith recounts. “When we held auditions, we just couldn’t find the right actress with the right soprano voice to play the part, so I cast Cici Lin ’23, one of our boarding students, to play her as a dancer, and I was going to ask one of our other American students to sing her songs. “But then Judy Zhu ’21, who had performed in
