Musical Madness and Fun

Last August I was asked to be the production organizer for a musical that the youth in our stake are going to put on for their 2010 youth conference. It’s a new musical called "Built on the Rock," written by a good friend of mine at church and her sister.

The music is inspirational, catchy, and most importantly, not cheesy. Its purpose is to show that the Book of Mormon teaches us how to come unto Christ. I can’t wait for everyone in our stake to hear it, and I think it’s going to be reproduced in other stakes or wards as well because it’s that good.

In the last few months, I’ve been doing a lot of work for the musical: registering the youth, publicizing rehearsal dates, reminding youth of the rehearsals, putting together music folders, organizing auditions, putting together the cast list, putting together packets and rehearsal schedules for the cast, scheduling buildings for our rehearsals, making lots and lots of copies, making sure that I have the youth’s correct contact info, assigning youth to tech roles, et cetera, et cetera.

Dana, the creator of the show, has done these and so much more. I think that she is truly endowed with special blessings to help her handle it all. There are so many aspects of the production and there are so many talented people that are working on it too.

One of the challenging things about putting on a brand-new musical is that the music and the script is unfamiliar. So the youth didn’t really know what they were trying out for or what they were singing. But what has amazed me is that the youth are so excited about it and are catching the vision of the show. Youth have told me that they wished we had more practices, that they love the music, that the music sticks with them throughout the day. That makes this all the more worthwhile.

Another thing that has made this interesting is that in an effort to save paper and money, Dana has created music with only the vocal parts for the youth (without the music parts), which reduced a lot of music to one or two pages, sometimes three. She would have the music ready a week or two before the rehearsal, and we’d have to put open up all 200 folders and insert the music in them. The youth helped immensely in this effort before the practice whenever we had to do this.

However, there was one rehearsal where we didn’t have enough time to put the music in all of the folders’ brackets, so we just stuck them in the back of the folder. Bad idea. The music would slip out of the folders and later on we had to figure out which folders didn’t have complete music sets, et cetera.

Anyway, needless to say, it’s a lot of work, and that’s what has kept me busy for several days on end. It’s almost been a part-time job. But it’s worth it and I can’t wait to see it all come together.

One of the logos that the communications coordinator put together. Neat, huh?