Footloose

So, somehow I got roped into playing clarinet for my school’s musical this week. Which, granted, is something I’ve always wanted to do, but I didn’t volunteer to play for a reason. There’s a Japanese high school band coming to Florida this week (students from my school, including myself, are housing them for two nights). I hadn’t volunteered to play for the musical because I wanted to go to their performance Thursday night — which I can’t do because of the musical.

But either way, playing for the musical or going to the concert, I’d be missing out on something I really want to do, so I figured I might as well make the best of it, since my band director asked me to do this.

The problem is that our drama department (as lackluster as it is this year with the new teacher) is performing Footloose.

I had heard of it, but I had never heard the music from it, didn’t know what it was about, anything. Well, now I know what it’s about. (In a nutshell, some punk kid from Chicago moves to Bomont — which, by the way, is in Texas, assuming the writers meant Beaumont; otherwise, it’s in West Virginia — and in this little rural town, dancing is illegal. So he and his new Bomont/Beaumont buddies rally together to abolish the anti-dancing laws.)

Which is all well and good for a musical. Except the music is not all that great. We (the band students playing in the pit) complained to the choral director, and he told us “You should see the original score; it’s worse than the one we have.”

We had our first full-rehearsal this past Wednesday. One of my friends, who has played in the pit for our school’s annual musical twice before, told me that the show has never been this rough a week before the show. Even I, without having any sort of reference point to judge how rough the show really was, noticed that it was pretty bad, to say the least.

Basically, our Ren is, to put it mildly, flamboyant. He’s over the top; it’s horrendous. (By the way, he expects to get into (SC)AMDA “based on his talent, not on his grades,” then work on a cruise ship for a while before taking his career to Broadway. I wish him the best of luck in his endeavor. He’ll need it.) He’s the son of the drama teacher (so, naturally, he has the lead part), and as a former department member told me, he and his mother believe in entertaining, but not acting.

The singing is on-key about half the time, and when it is, the people onstage don’t know how to follow KP’s directing. Rarely do I know how my part is supposed to fit into the vocalists’, and when I do, I still feel unsure of myself because whoever is singing will be fluctuating so badly in his tempo that I begin to wonder if he’s singing the same song I’m trying to play.

But, anyway. The show opens Thursday; we have rehearsals Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Hopefully things will shape up between now and then.

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