After seven months of relentless rehearsals, IST’s era of Bugsy Malone has finally come to an end. Around three weeks before the finale of all this Bugsy madness, I and ten other year 12s had the immense pleasure of joining the backstage crew to take on the enormous task of organising over forty excitable students from years 7 to 9 into some form of coherent calm.
On stage it was all coordinated dances and rehearsed lines, but backstage, things were of a slightly different nature. “Organised chaos” is perhaps the best way to describe the preparation that took place behind the scenes.
In the music block, a dozen ever-patient mothers and three lovely year 12s applied makeup and shocking amounts of hair gel to our actors.
In the “changing rooms”, costumes and accessories lay scattered about, the atmosphere charged with excitement. In fact, it was probably hard to recognise both Ms Moore’s and Ms Whiteman’s classrooms with all the mobile phones, crisps and fizzy drinks spread out amongst the performers.
In the halls were our runners, given the job of racing to and from the changing rooms in order to tell awaiting actors when they were needed on stage.
Inside the oval itself several of us had the key role of organising the extensive array of props, including an seemingly endless number of cans of silly string and a piano top covered in shaving-cream pies. These IB students had to work in near darkness, with merely a weak camping lamp to help read their battered, heavily annotated scripts.
Within the hall itself, the remaining backstage crew took care of the props and ensured the flow of the performance.
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