The Outsiders Set to Premiere on April 19

The theater department has decided to take on the famously known story of The Outsiders for their spring production, with Paul Raska as the acting director and Amanda Brundrett as the technical director. This story was originally written as a novel by S. E. Hinton, but our student body and staff are getting antsy to see our theater department’s take on it.

Showtimes for the production will last through April 19 to April 21, all at 7:00 p.m. in the auditorium.

Since the beginning of Feb., everyone involved in the production has been working countless hours in order to best prepare for the show. Rehearsal time for the cast and crew goes from 7:00 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. every weekday.

With the overwhelming amount of male roles in this specific production, it was important that the rehearsal times would work for all of them due to the fact that many of those male cast members were already previously involved with sports that practice after school.

When the cast list was first publicized, students that had auditioned for a role were anticipating to get their results. Juniors Sarah Mizell, playing the role of Marcia, and Brian Vasquez, playing the role of Ponyboy Curtis, were both eager to say the least in regards to finding out what role they were picked for.

“The directors told us that the cast list would be posted no later than 8:00 p.m., but I stayed up until 11:00 p.m. because I was too nervous to sleep and the list still wasn’t posted,” Mizell said. “Whenever the cast list came out, we were all so excited just to jump right into it. I screamed a little because this is my first lead role.”

Teamwork is a big component in the success of a production, and it’s all up to the students to make it work. Without support from your peers in any activity, it’s hard to move forward or improve on anything, but the students involved in The Outsiders have been doing just the opposite.

“The cast and company as a whole has overall been pretty supportive of each other,” Vasquez said. “Seeing that there’s a lot of new faces, I usually take the opportunity to talk to cast members that are struggling with a scene to try to help out and teach them things that I learned or have used as an actor.”

According to students in theater, choosing to do The Outsiders for the spring production was mainly an effort to expand the theater department towards students that weren’t previously involved in theater, but were open to it. The Outsiders is a well-known story throughout the United States, and the theater department figured the turnout for auditions would be great. They were right.

“We were all pretty grateful for all the boys who auditioned,” said Mizell. “That was kind of the whole point of having The Outsiders as our show. We want to expand our theater department and welcome new people, and when we saw how many new faces auditioned, we knew this was a great idea. I mean, who doesn’t like The Outsiders?”