BLOOMFIELD, NJ — In the midst of a pandemic and with most schools open only for virtual learning until recently, the Bloomfield High School theater department still managed to put on all three of its scheduled shows this school year.
The last one of the school year — “Six Feet Apart,” a night of song, dance, scene and poetry — will take the stage in the BHS auditorium on May 21 and May 22. A theatrical concert that tells the story of the pandemic from students’ perspectives, the show intersperses musical theater and pop songs with work written by seniors Emma Morse and Ayiana Caberte.
“It’s about the pandemic, isolation, the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, all the stuff that came up at the same time and how we’re dealing with it,” BHS theater teacher and director Brandon Doemling said in a phone interview with The Independent Press on May 14.
The songs match the timeline of the COVID-19 shutdown and everything that has happened in the intervening months: “Once and for All” from the musical “Newsies”; “When Will My Life Begin?” from the movie “Tangled,” to illustrate the loneliness many students felt during quarantine; “September” by Earth, Wind & Fire to convey the joy of school opening again; and “I Know It’s Today” from “Shrek the Musical.” The show closes with “Opening Up,” a song from the musical “Waitress” that is used in the BHS production to signify optimism about the end of the pandemic.
“How do these songs apply to now?” Doemling said. “In ‘Newsies,’ that song is about a strike, but here it’s about Black Lives Matter.”
Morse and Caberte have been building the show in class for most of the year, deciding what songs would make sense to use and writing their own work around them.
“These songs make sense with teen angst but are also relevant to what’s been going on,” Caberte said in a phone interview with The Independent Press on May 14. “There aren’t written characters. You’re performing a different version of yourself.”
She and Morse are also both in the cast; during the last few weeks of rehearsal they have been working on continuity, so a more somber spoken piece doesn’t transition into an upbeat song and make the show tonally confusing.
This is the ninth spring production the BHS theater department has staged. Unlike the play in the fall and the annual winter musical, the spring show is compiled and produced by the students. It’s the first time this particular show will be staged anywhere, and, because it came entirely out of the students’ own creative process, there isn’t a model to look to for guidance. The songs that are from other musicals will be performed out of context from the story they were written to serve.
“We’re taking this song out of the context of ‘Shrek,’” Caberte said. “So that’s what we’re working on now.”
Still, the cast can allude to how the songs were used in the original shows while putting their own spin on them.
“This isn’t about a news strike, this is relevant to now,” Morse said about “Once and for All.” “So we have to look at how they were intended but also put it into our show.”
The student production team decided to make the hook of the show the pandemic and resulting quarantine. Through music and the writing that Morse and Caberte did, “Six Feet Apart” will aim to explain how the students felt going through this unusual time.
“This year we wanted to focus on quarantine, because it was hard to explain what it was like during 2020 without also talking about everything else,” Morse said. “I don’t know if they’re mutually exclusive or if one couldn’t happen without the other, but this is how we can talk about it.”
Performances of “Six Feet Apart” are on May 21 and May 22 at 7 p.m. in the BHS auditorium. Tickets may be purchased at the door or online at www.bhsthespiansociety.ticketleap.com.
Photos Courtesy of Maria Rivas and Julia Aiello
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