Drury Arts Students To Perform Amadeus & Sgt. Pepper
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — The Drury Arts Department will bring the play "Amadeus" and the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" to the stage this spring.
Media arts teacher Jamie Choquette said because of the high quality and talented students in the art department this year, they decided to raise the bar and take on more challenging performances to close out the year.
"The level of competence with this class was very high, and we decided that even though we were planning to do a smaller production these kids deserved something bigger," Choquette said. "There are so many students this year who are going to become music majors, study drama and acting in college, go into communications, recording, or study the music industry."
First to open will be the play "Amadeus," a play written by Peter Shaffer that premiered in 1979 and tells a fictionalized account of the lives of composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri.
Choquette said the performance includes the Drury Stage Team and many other arts students. Also, the Drury Performing Arts Management (DPAM) students will produce the show and make sure everything runs smoothly.
The tech arts department even helped and built a model harpsichord.
"They rolled out today a whole harpsichord," he said. "We decided our piano was made way too late in history. We have a beautiful piano but we needed a harpsichord because this is 1780."
"Amadeus" opens Thursday, April 28, at 7 p.m. There will also be shows on Friday and Saturday, also at 7. Tickets are available at the door: $5 for students, $7 for adults. Tickets can also be purchased online.
On May 19, the arts department will perform the classic 1967 Beatles album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."
Choquette said a quarter of the student body is involved in the production.
The show is still in production: the band and chorus are learning the music, and the stage company is working on a script. DPAM is planning the visual aspects of the show, production and advertisement.
Last year, the school took on Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon," which Choquette said was easier to adapt because Pink Floyd often performed the album in its entirety live. Sgt. Pepper, however, brings new challenges.
"'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' was never made to be performed. The Beatles were sick of performing live and they made a studio album," he said. "We are figuring it out as we go because there is nothing to copy because there is no concert to look back on and see how they did it."
The promotional poster is complete and mimics the classic album cover that features the Beatles in costume as the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band standing with a group of well-known people and celebrities.
"Each student was assigned to one of the people that the Beatles picked for the album. They picked from people like Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, Lenny Bruce and Bob Dylan," he said. "They had to dress up as them when they came in that day."
Choquette said they had more students than the people on the album cover so extra students dressed as characters they felt the Beatles may have added, like Rosa Parks or Rosie the Riveter
A statue, a trophy, and a buried television also appears on the album cover; the Drury version shows a bust of Nathan Drury, a buried TV with the school's television station logo on it, and a trophy that the band won.
He added that Quadland's donated the flowers needed to spell out Drury.
This show will be free.
Choquette urged residents to come see what the students are capable of.
"I don't think people in this community understand the level this art department has risen to, and the great people, from the superintendent all the way down to the teachers, that work here and the students that have benefited," he said. "I think I would not be wrong to say you cannot experience something like this in any other high school in the northeast.
"These students are exceptional."
Tags: Drury High, high school musical,
