PAPER TRAILS: The Rep’s song video nice touch

Sean Clancy, Paper Trails columnist
Sean Clancy, Paper Trails columnist

The Rep’s production of “Bye Bye Birdie” was scheduled for this summer, but you can guess what happened, right?

Yeah. The pandemic. So that Birdie really did go Bye Bye, and the musical was canceled.

But check this out. The Rep has posted a joyously fun little video of the song “The Telephone Hour” from the show.

The clip, featuring Central Arkansas teenagers who were part of the production, shows them singing “The Telephone Hour” into telephones in their rooms in a grid pattern inspired by the production and cheekily reminiscent of Zoom video meetings that have become so common.

It’s a hoot.

[Video not showing up above? Click here to view » https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g25_nFTS2Ts]

Will Trice, The Rep’s executive artistic director, and Anna Kimmell, The Rep’s director of education, directed the video. It was edited by Chris Cranford.

“We’ve been pretty conservative at The Rep about the things we put out in terms of digital content,” Trice says. “But this just checked all of the boxes. It’s a perfect song, and we had all of these great, local kids.”

For “Bye Bye Birdie,” The Rep wanted to cast local high school performers alongside adult actors. Last fall, The Rep put on audition workshops at Pulaski County high schools to walk students through the audition process.

After that, more than 60 students tried out for the show, and 18 were chosen to play the teens of Sweet Apple, Ohio, where the musical is set.

The Rep documented the process in a neat short series called “Building Birdie,” which can be seen at therep.org (look under the Community Programs tab).

It may have seemed that the show’s cancellation meant that the students’ hard work was for naught, but The Rep wanted to show off the young, local talent involved in the production.

The students rehearsed their parts for “The Telephone Hour” over Zoom, Trice says. The Rep created a musical track for them, and they recorded themselves singing. Their versions where then mixed into a single track that was given to the students to use when they recorded their video footage, which was then edited together into the final product.

Whew!

“We had storyboards,” Trice says. “Anna Kimmell came up with the movements the kids were doing in their boxes. It was really fun to work on.”

There’s no replacing the excitement and experience of performing onstage, Trice admits, but the video could help take away at least some of the sting of the cancellation and provide a bright spot at a time when things seem so dark.

“We just wanted to put out some joy,” says Trice. “That was exactly the point of this from our perspective. We wanted to put out a really great musical number, some good art that’s really fun, and brighten people’s day.”

View “The Telephone Hour” below.

email: sclancy@adgnewsroom. com

VIDEO ONLINE

‘The Telephone Hour’

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