It’s official, CCS is producing the hit musical Music Man coming spring of 2023. The announcement of the Spring 2023 High School Musical has been long awaited at CCS as everyone loves to attend the musicals. Students wondered and guessed for months on what director and theatrics department head, Mary Catherine Schimpf, would pick for this year’s musical. After all the waiting, the announcement finally hit the CCS community but with a twist.
First, here is a quick synopsis of Music Man for those who are unsure, by theater department head Mary Catherine Schimpf. She states, “ It’s a story taking place around 1912, it’s about a traveling salesman who comes to a little town in Iowa to sell band instruments. He is kind of sleazy and wants to slide into town and make a lot of money then quickly leave. However, he falls in love and gets trapped. The town is very stiff and doesn’t want to really get to know him, but he changes the town and the town changes him. In the end, there is a lot of new growth in the town and everyone is changed by one another. The simplest way to describe it is love story, funny, clashing of worlds, lots of dancing, and lots of singing of course.” It is definitely a musical you’ll want to go see!
This year the theater department decided to spice things up and announce the musical in a unique way. The theater department decided they would trick the students. Tech Head and Photographer for the theater department, Heath Austin says, “We love making everyone mad, it’s one of my favorite things.” Thus, the theater department decided they wanted students to have to figure out the musical on their own.
Austin runs the CCS theater social media page and so he decided to post a poll for students to guess the musical, saying if someone guesses it, they would release the musical. They also put a countdown on Instagram to be set off at 8am when they would release the show if nobody guessed it. This got the students super hyped up for the musical release and everyone began guessing what the spring musical would be. Some even guessed right, but Austin didn’t let them know. Then the theater department played a trick on the students, Austin says, “After rehearsals, we put props on the stage and put a spotlight over them and left. The plan was to not say anything but give everyone a fake announcement in the morning. So, I went to the dentist and the countdown went off. Everyone was really upset when nothing was announced. My phone rang at least thirty times but I was at the dentist so I couldn’t do anything. Then people figured out to look on the stage.” So, basically when the announcement went off and there was no announcement, the students began to get agitated that they still didn’t know the musical.
Austin began to get crazy amounts of calls and messages from upset students about the musical. Student and Costume Crew head Joanna Ward said, “Heath is so crazy, he has been saying he was going to tell us for weeks. I remember waiting for the countdown to go off. You can’t trust Heath, he will lie to you and trick you when it comes to theater things. Heath really kept us eager and waiting to figure out the musical”.
Long story short, after all the trickery and fun festivities of trying to discover the musical, the students found the clues hidden on the stage. When they saw the instruments and the specific Music Man themed clues, they knew what the musical was. It’s official, Music Man is coming to CCS this spring. All the students and people of the community are excited. It’s going to be a great musical and when tickets go on sale everyone should definitely come see the musical that was so long awaited to be announced.