By Kyra Ho

When you go to see a show you do just that, you see it. You see the costumes, the movement, the set - and spy any negative detail. You don’t see members of the production team eating pints of ice cream together in a room of ‘palpable tension’ like some sort of dessert-based group therapy waiting for email confirmation that they can dedicate the next few months of their lives to putting on a musical that will only run for three days. Nor do you see set-designers raking through a script to price up every piece of wood/metal/any imaginable material that might be used, or cast members practicing choreography in their dorm rooms-cum-assault courses.

Chicago is a monster of a show that depends immensely on visuals; its Jazz-age aesthetic and iconic choreography (rarely deviating much from Fosse’s original) are inseparable from any version. As something that relies so much on what is seen, it’s the perfect example of how key elements in the production of a musical can be hugely overlooked.

I spoke to some of the people involved in this semester’s musical, who told me about their hard work, tiredness, stress, exasperation and complete lack of regret. I sat with the Producer (Cate Hanlon), Vocal M.D. (Preston Firestone), Ensemble actor (Ben Anderson), the actor playing Velma (Catriona Kadirkamanathan) and the Set-Designer (Natasha Maurer), they summed up their experience of the rehearsal process:

‘Busy, exciting.’

‘A lot of lifting.’

‘Expansive, like keeping a running list in your head…’

‘Challenging to make a cohesive whole.’

‘…trying to get enough sleep.’

The production has a cast and crew of around 50 people, and a production team made of two merged together, so designating roles and reducing overlap became another task on the endless list of putting on a musical.

Perhaps the first thing I should mention is that the show which constitutes at most four hours of an audience member’s life has been rehearsed three times a week for months by the cast, and conceptualised and planned for much longer by the production team. It is something that will seep into every aspect of your life if you let it. For example, Producer Hanlon describes catching up on organising the show in any moment of free time and Set-Designer Maurer mentioned lightly that stress-dreaming about shows she’s working on is nothing out of the ordinary for her. She showed me some designs of sets she’d made long before she’d proposed them:

The application process to put on a show through the University’s Musical Theatre society is called ‘Proposals’ and is like a group interview for a job won’t get paid for, probably won’t be able to put on your CV, for which you will be beyond devast… — The application process to put on a show through the University’s Musical Theatre society is called ‘Proposals’ and is like a group interview for a job won’t get paid for, probably won’t be able to put on your CV, for which you will be beyond devastated if you get rejected.

They also mentioned having to change their set half-way through the building process due to some arbitrary regulations set by Fife Council, rules that seemed tedious to listen to and ultimately inconsequential but had to be adhered to nevertheless. Even in student productions, shows are at the mercy of bureaucracy from start to finish. The Chicago production team had three different versions of the show planned dependant on what sort of budget they would be allocated. The hiring of mics, set materials, the cost of rights, and props are just some of the things that must be considered carefully before rehearsals even get underway. Maurer speaks of having to ‘not get too attached’ to beloved parts of the show, in case they breach some regulation or cost too much; student theatre will always be limited by money. Basically, what I’m saying is, go easy on student shows. They are rarely fully reflective of creative talent, rather they are a platform for ambitious, interesting concepts that get watered down by our theatre venue overlords, but the Chicago team seem to be taking this in their stride.

What you won’t see next week when the show goes up is half of the band backstage, the metronome playing in every band member’s ear, a band that has been rehearsing together several weeks before opening night (ridiculously rare in St A), the difficulties of teaching music to a cast of varying musical backgrounds, endless physical warmups, hours of rehearsal and perhaps most importantly: the difficulty of finding a house that can hold a social for 50+ people.

If you’d like an example of dedication to the show, the cast were recommended to take up cardio training classes or a new form of cardio during the rehearsal period, and they actually did. The instrumentation has also been adapted for a ‘banjolele’ – a cursed object if ever there were one, though I’m sure it will more than do the job. Such efforts for what is essentially a hobby might be a little extreme, but that just goes to show how much value the cast and crew attribute to the musical, and this respect is perhaps the thing that will set it apart from the usual university production.

The show goes up the 12th to the 14th of November in the Byre Theatre and more information can be found here: https://byretheatre.com/events/just-so-society-chicago/?fbclid=IwAR3x6g-MTLZxfFrV_2kSdg9KUU3rYtpfX0Abjfukn4BbwCCMLBqjfLYsUXg