By Madeline Brooks and Sophie Streiff
“We’re finally at the tipping point where people go to see shows and they see people who look like them on stage every single time, and it doesn’t matter who you are, you see somebody who looks like you,” said East’s theater teacher Hope Hynes Love, who is directing Hairspray, East’s spring musical.
The theater department has a mission statement regarding their after school productions; it outlines creating a more inclusive performance environment.
“It’s generally about every four years making sure that we cover a variety of styles, and also age-appropriate, and also where we’re going as a program,” said Hynes.
Hairspray, which was performed March 5-7, was the largest production that the school has put on, with a cast of 60 students and a plethora of students working backstage. It was one that Hynes wasn’t sure they could do until this year, because before this year, the theater department didn’t know if they could get enough students to audition to fill all of the diverse roles required by Hairspray.
“It’s taken us 15 years to have a casting pool that could support this kind of musical,” said Hynes. “As far as having that kind of casting pool in the after school availability, this is the first year we’ve been able to do that.”
Because Hairspray has such a large cast size, a handful of roles have been filled by students who have never before participated in an East theater production. Among them is Esther Bach, a junior, who never expected to get cast as Tracy Turnblad, the lead of the musical.
“This is my first school thing, which is crazy to me that I went in auditioning and I was like, ‘This is just for fun,’” said Bach. “But then I got a callback for Tracy.”
Hynes is making extra effort to get new students involved in Hairspray, and that means making some compromises on scheduling.
“There were situations where people were like, “this person is such a good fit for this role that we will just have to work our schedules around them,’’ said Aparna Nair, a stage manager.
A lot of the new actors Hynes recruited are cheerleaders, with whom the theater department has worked out a unique rehearsal schedule where the cheerleaders who are in Hairspray have cheer every school day until six or six thirty, and then go to rehearsal until eight.
“So I’m here all the time,” said Alicia Davis, a cheerleader who plays Motormouth Maybelle.
Besides bringing in new theater participants, many of the actors in Hairspray have been in theater productions both at East and at other acting companies.
Junior Imani Chabikuli, who plays Seaweed J. Stubbs, has been in East’s theater productions since his freshman year when he was in Antigone.
“I walked onto the stage for five seconds or something like that, but it was crazy,” said Chabikuli. “It’s something that means a lot to me personally, because there’s nothing like it.”
Richard Yuan, who plays Corny Collins, also started participating with East theater during his freshman year with a big role in The Sound of Music.
“It was a really big jump at first because I actually had a fairly big role in that one, which really helped me learn really quickly,” said Yuan. “I really appreciate the experiences I got from that, because I went from pretty much nothing to being able to hold my own on stage.”
Hairspray has also led to actors, like senior Joe Davis, branching out from acting roles that they typically do.
“I’m playing Edna, which is Tracy’s mom,” said Davis. “You just have to be able to put yourself out there and not really worry about how the people are going to react because in the end, it’s really fun to be as crazy as you can.”
To help with the accuracy of the production, Erin Sullivan, who was a part of the Broadway national tour from 2008 to 2010, has been brought on as a consultant to help with choreography and hair and makeup design. Fiona Clancy, the props designer, has also been working to make sure the props match the original product as well as are safe for actors to use.
