Hiccups don’t stop show

Marjorie Kirk

On Broadway, the show goes on, even when there is no time to put on shoes or if a crew member drops a cow.

The UK Choristers pulled through despite hiccups in performances of Broadway classics Saturday for “A Night on Broadway” at the Singletary Center.

From the audience’s perspective, the evening’s performances went off with few hitches, apart from a hidden crew member who was exposed after she dropped the cardboard cow prop in “Into the Woods,” but backstage the cast and crew were privy to details the crowd may have missed.

The production’s director, Elizabeth Wilson, and co-director, Karina Johnson, began planning the production last semester, but they only had about three weeks, minus seven hours lost to snow cancellations, to put it together after students returned from winter break.

“One of the boys backstage couldn’t find his black shirt and so we stripped another boy of his black shirt since he wasn’t in that particular number and Mason (Rice) ran out, but he didn’t have time to put his shoes on,” Wilson said. “We always planned for Mason, who was in the following number, to be jacketed onstage, but they also ended up bringing out his shoes. So we dressed him fully onstage — thank God he had pants and a shirt on.”

While the songs and singers had been selected before the spring semester, the production was set back when Kelsey Sandel took over as the choreographer for her studio’s owner, Diana Evans Pulliam, who lost her mother the first week of the semester. Despite the speedy production and complications, the students enjoyed the experience.

“It’s just really fun to be able to get into a big group like this and be able to put something like this on as quickly as we did and as awesome as we did,” arts administration senior Devyn Edwards said.

Edwards said she was happy to perform with her close friend Andrew Durham as the Thenardiers in the finale, “One Day More” from “Les Miserables.”

Vocal performance sophomore Blake Denson fulfilled his desire to perform as Jean Valjean from “Les Miserables,” despite his late start singing in his senior year of high school.

“Music to me is like being able to express yourself in ways that you can’t verbally,” he said. “It takes your whole body to make sound, (you’re) more connected with your body when you sing.”