Parker Upper School Performs This Murder Was Staged: A Recap

Last spring, I sat down with the acting class to table-read This Murder Was Staged. As Ms. Duggan wrote in her Directors’ Notes in the playbill last week, the moment we read it, we knew this was going to be our fall play. A lot of the time it can be hard to find a show that everybody likes and that fits our cast, but TMWS had everything: a large cast, a challenging number of lines, and a hilarious plot. There were lots of opportunities for a creative set, and I vividly remember crying of laughter every 5 minutes during our first read-through last May.

If you came to watch the show, you might not know that there were actually 3 ending options written in the script, to choose from based on the size of the cast. We chose the large cast ending, but if we had had a smaller cast, we might have chosen the ending option where the director and detective had worked together to fake his death. All of the options were hilarious, but the adaptability of the script made it easy to work with.

One of the best things about this show was getting time to really work with our characters and develop them fully. The straight plays (non-musical) in the fall are where we focus on acting technique and character development so that during the spring musicals, we can tackle complicated music and dance. We finished blocking a couple of weeks after the cast list came out, which gave us a lot more flexibility. One day, we all had to improv and interact with each other as our characters (I just monologued to everyone I met), and we also developed specific motions and mannerisms that we can utilize to really show who our characters are.

As a cast, we bonded more during this show than ever before. This was my 7th show with Dramatiques, and each time I keep thinking that it couldn’t get any better— and then it does. Every rehearsal, we were cracking up at something, whether it was the silliness written into the script or the comedic timing we learned to master. I watched people I’ve known for years explore new character archetypes and discover new niches that they completely excelled at.

I asked the cast for some of their favorite moments and quotes from the show. A clear one was “hammer-uppers,” which was Carter’s character’s game of choice and entailed throwing a hammer into the air and seeing where it lands (which incidentally turned out to be the director’s head). Sounds enthralling, I know. My personal favorite was Josiah’s character’s strange obsession with the Cherry ‘93 Mazda Miata belonging to the dead director (played by Chaucer), to the point where it was heavily implied that he murdered the director in order to inherit it sooner. Outside of the show, we had just as much fun. It turns out that being stuck in a theatre with the same 25 people for two weeks kind of forces you to bond— some theatres call tech week “hell week,” but it’s always been my favorite part of a show. We came out of it with a thousand inside jokes and more memories. Notably, a cast pick was our tradition of having a cast lunch at the food court and pushing together a bunch of tables in the back between the matinee and the final show on Saturday. This time, simply running lines and eating AirHeads was one of the best moments of the entire show. It goes to show that with the right group of people, anything can be fun.

Opening night was genuinely one of the best opening nights I’ve ever experienced. There were next to no mistakes, and everything flowed smoothly. Usually, the nerves get the best of us, but the extra time we’d had in rehearsals added up and helped it go simply beautifully. Friday night was similarly incredible. My personal favorite moment of the entire show occurred that night, when I impulsively grabbed Mikali’s apple out of her mouth instead of waiting for her to hold it out. It got more laughs, but I don’t think anybody found it anywhere near as funny as we did, to the point where we almost broke character laughing. Friday night shows are usually low-energy, but energy was not an issue this time.

The matinee was our worst performance by the high standards we had set the previous two shows, but in retrospect, it was still great. Matinees are usually difficult because the audience is typically young children with an early bedtime who don’t always get the jokes. Although there was a smaller audience, they still laughed at the slapstick comedy moments, and even though a fair amount of mistakes were made, we handled them with grace.

Closing night was incredible. We were so proud of everything we had done so far and knew that this would be our last chance to make it even better. There were no mistakes, the crowd was perfect, and spirits were high. During our final bow that night, I cried for the first time. In my seventh show during my senior year, I realized just how proud I was of what the program has become. It was bittersweet because it was over, but we had just done something so amazing. Performing is scary because you’re entertaining an audience, and I consider it the most empathetic art form. You have to have high enough emotional intelligence to embody an entirely different person for two hours, while simultaneously making choices to engage the audience based on what you know about the human mind. After a couple of months of rehearsal for one show, you gain that much more respect for the people around you— you have to, in order to entertain them. Ms. Duggan was instrumental in this, teaching us techniques and giving us the starting point from which we could create our characters.

Overall, I’m endlessly grateful for everything and everyone I’ve gained from this show. If you came to see it, thank you for supporting our program. If you didn’t, I hope you’ll consider coming to see Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (our first full-length musical!) in the spring!