This musical does not ask a lot of production at face value, which is typicaly great for an educational experience in a small space. That said, we wanted to provide more interest and theatricality to teach as much as we could to the teen mentees. The director had an initial idea around the initial math problem “haunting” Melissa, leading to a larger dreamscape-like sequence in the end where her friends help her through her stage fright in her mind. I proposed the idea of recording the actors’ voices in rehearsal to have different parts echoing in different parts of the show, which became the main aspect of design choices. It was my favorite part because along with mentoring my sound mentee, I got to provide a little bit of direction to the actors in our recording sessions. I inherently got to know more about their acting choices which informed more of my designs, like just how anxious does Melissa get, or what kind of “popular girl” Amber is.

We also were working with tracks, rather than a live band which presented its own challenges. This production’s tracks were minimal as they were likely not originally intended to be used in performance, so it became difficult for our student actors to know when to come in. It became another duty of mine to edit those tracks, both in pre-production to add more to fill out the music, and in QLab to provide the stage manager the ability to vamp music as needed and add cues for the actors to know when to move into the next section. Despite those challenges, this was the most confident I was in my mixing and made it a more enjoyable experience, when before I mostly only enjoyed the design aspect.