Camp has started, and our summer camp production is always an interesting one to work on.

First of all, it’s a larger group of people on the production side than we usually have during rehearsals for our mainstage productions. We’ve got Landrie and myself, 3 college-age interns, whose internships are sponsored by TCA (Texas Commission on the Arts – the same organization who sponsored my own apprenticeship here 5 years ago!), 4 high school-age production interns, the director, the musical director, the choreographer, the costume designer, the set designer, the lighting designer, the sound designer, the costume assistant… basically a lot of people who are here to get this production of Schoolhouse Rock Live! going strong.

Secondly, design-wise, we’re taking the camp show and putting it on a pre-existing set with a pre-existing light design – it’s not being created from scratch as all of our other productions are. That does make it a different process than usual, but in the end, it’s really fun to see how a production design like that of our mainstage Take Me Out will be turned into a schoolhouse complete with a tree house and playground equipment (courtesy of camp set designer Clare Floyd DeVries and her assistant, TCA Design Intern Paul Arebalo Jr.). But hey, last year we took a set that represented two Los Angeles apartments and turned it into the magical world of Whos and a Jungle of Nool, so that just proves what we’ve all known - anything can happen in the magical world of theatre…

-Heidi Shen

WTT's Resident Stage Manager