By Greta Blasszauer - Soos
Correspondent
As the lights dimmed and the crowd silenced their conversations, the band played their first song: “Jet Set” from “Catch Me If You Can.” The spotlight shone on a girl in a white blouse and a flight attendant hat walking toward the center of the stage, and the show “Another Suitcase: A Musical Revue” began.
TCNJ Lyric Theatre performed a musical revue called “Another Suitcase” at the College Don Evans black box theater on Nov. 12th at 7:30 p.m for its opening night. A musical revue entails a musical that uses music from different music genres such as musicals and pop songs. In “Another Suitcase,” the numbers performed were connected through suitcases that appeared as props in all of the songs. With the suitcases and the many musical numbers, characters arrived, left, broke up, traveled or started over.
“Another Suitcase” was the first performance of TCNJ Lyric Theater since the pandemic, and Musical Theatre NYU Professor Brewer’s first-time directing at the College. The fact students had the opportunity to perform was refreshing to him.
“[The pandemic] didn’t feel like it was a lost time,” Brewer said.
Even with the difficulties of the masks, there were no issues with the projection of the singers.
“I was a little worried about projection,” said Sydney Johnson, a sophomore undeclared student at Princeton who was invited by one of the cast members.
While preparing for the show, Brewer focused on getting to know the cast and wanted to highlight the strengths of each student. Therefore, the songs were chosen based on the eight students' different strengths. The TCNJ Lyric Theatre also had the issue of not knowing how many students would stay enrolled in the musical theatre course, so the cast number was not immediately set. Students tried the class out and saw if Lyric Theatre worked with their schedule during those two weeks in the add/drop season.
“(It was) easier to create a show for the students that we had,” Brewer said, meaning they worked with the students who were already enrolled in Lyric Theatre.
Brewer created the idea of the musical revue through the cast’s ability in acting and singing. The suitcase thus was the storytelling prop for “Another Suitcase” as he wanted to “highlight all of them equally” by choosing songs that fit with the student’s capacity. He achieved his goal of telling a story about traveling through life with songs that fit the students. This was possible by having the stories of the characters connect to each other and yet still be independent enough to stand alone.
“It has been fun to create a story through their relationship on stage and through that prop,” said Brewer.
Many of the students performed for the first time that night, like Kenu Ogbevire, a 5th year biology major.
“(It is) great to get that experience (in theater),” Ogbevire said. She decided on enrolling in the Lyric Theatre course due to open space in her schedule. She intends to go into acting and used this to gain more practice.
While the main reaction from the crowd was cheering, Mark Squindo’s and Jason Thompson’s performance of the “Travel Song” from the musical “Shrek” caused many laughs. Lines such as “hey, there's a band on the road” and the question “why me?” answered with the word Wawa, which was changed from the original to fit better with the audience by referring to New Jersey jokes.
Brewer is proud of his students for pulling off the musical revue.
“(Students had to) walk into a lot of unknowns, and they embraced this sort of original concept as a devised piece,” Brewer said.
Students used their strengths to put on their show. They also went through a professional rehearsal with high expectations and fast learning, and all students accepted the challenge.
“I am the most proud of my cast out of everything,” Ogbevire said. “They are such hard workers, and we were able to celebrate our hard work in the performance today.”
