The cast of A Light in the Dark — the showcase from Lights Up Drama Club at Wilbur Cross High School, which will be broadcast June 4 and 5 — assembled in a rehearsal room at the school that would also serve as the beginning scene for the number “I Feel So Much Spring,” from the William Finn-penned musical A New Brain.
As the music began, and music director Matt Durland conducted, all the voices behind the masks sprang to life.
The students glided across the floor as co-director Salvatore DeLucia weaved among them with a camera. It would all be edited together into a final product, with 17 other songs, in time for broadcast.
Brian Slattery Photos
DeLucia and Bazinet.
“This is a marriage of my two loves, theater and film,” DeLucia said, even if it was born “out of necessity…. Covid stopped us from the big musical number we were champing at the bit for,” but it was possible the showcase would be “more meaningful. This is our response to Covid. You want to shut us down? This is our rebuttal.”
In the fall, anticipating a possible end to the Covid-19 shutdown, Lights Up had planned to do a full production of The Little Mermaid.
“And then nobody came back to school,” said co-director Heather Bazinet.
“Just logistically it wasn’t a possibility,” DeLucia said.
But Lights Up still wanted to do something. In January Bazinet hit on the idea of a cabaret, “a showcase where we could allow our students to socially distance, from home if they wanted to.” And some students had returned to school. “Once sports were back,” Bazinet said, they asked themselves “why can’t we do stuff?”
“We felt it was a necessity. In this world, with these kids — letdown after letdown,” DeLucia said.
The Wilbur Cross administration gave Lights Up its support. Durland was eager to help. The club began brainstorming ideas and hammered out a story composed of 18 songs from different musicals, plus monologues and interviews. Act 1 would be about darkness, “how they were feeling when everything was shut down and there wasn’t a lot of hope,” Bazinet said. “Act 2 is more about hope and coming out of the darkness.” The song “I Feel So Much Spring” would serve as the finale.
As the students got started on rehearsals, DeLucia “planned the technical side of things,” with help from Wilbur Cross’s recording arts teacher Kendall Alderman and film teacher Jim Bellantoni. “We’re essentially making a music video,” DeLucia said. Alderman helped the students make a quality recording of the music beforehand. With all the audio complete, it was down to shooting the video, with DeLucia handling the camera, thanks to his collaboration with Bellantoni.
So as always, the Lights Up production was a team effort. “We each have our own area of expertise, and we trust each other, so things grow — things that could be good become amazing.”
The students completed a take of the first verse of the song.
“That was beautiful,” Bazinet said of their performance.
DeLucia agreed. “I want to do it one more time,” he said. “Once I get the shot I want, I always do one or two more. We have what we want. It can only be better.”
They did another take. The performance was even better. They made plans to move on to shooting the next verse, which would involve them first bursting out of the doors of the rehearsal space and into the hallway — and then out of the school itself, and into the spring sun.
“Even in the worst darkness, there’s always a glimmer of hope,” DeLucia said.
A Light in the Dark will be broadcast June 4 and June 5 at 7 p.m. Visit Lights Up’s website for tickets to the broadcast, which are $10.