Rae-diate

This past weekend the ONU Theatre Arts Department opened and closed our spring musical “Sweet Charity.” I was in the cast of Sweet Charity and I had a blast dancing, singing and playing onstage all weekend, but I also had a ton of fun behind the scenes! The backstage area of any show is a world within itself full of laughter, moments of bonding and the not-so-glamorous process of preparing for your next entrance. Sometimes my favorite memories of the show happen backstage. For this production our director Courtney Kattengell wanted us to share some of our backstage moments with our potential audience as a kind of marketing for the show. The way she wanted to try this was with Instagram stories. From everything I’ve learned in this class I realized how good of an idea this was, since the biggest appeal to instagram stories is it gives your customers or audience a behind the scenes look which draws them into you more. Recently we’ve been experimenting with promotional videos and there ...

            My younger brother is in an all-boys college a cappella group called the Originals, an award winning group full of talented vocalists. Music is his passion and he strives to be a leader in anything he is involved in. He recently took on the position of social media manager for his group. When I asked him about his experience, he had a lot to say! “As social media manager, I am in charge of making sure that our group has a strong online presence. In order to maintain an active fanbase and attempt to keep our name present and relevant in the collegiate and contemporary a cappella scene, social media is incredibly important. Our main forms of social media are Facebook and Instagram (follow us @cmuoriginals for dope music), and I use both of those to update our followers and the a cappella community on the ongoings of our group. This includes all sorts of events in our group, from members' birthdays to gigs to perfor...

“Boy, am I sick of this musical snake pit!” -Charity Hope Valentine, “Sweet Charity” Well friends, it is tech week. The time when musical theatre majors walk around like zombies with day-old mascara enhancing our dark under-eye circles, attempt to pick off the sticky goop on the back of our necks leftover from mic tape throughout the day, and basically move into the dressing rooms, seeing more of the mirror and stage lights than the sun light for at least five days. To the non-theatre person, what I just described might sound terrifying; like we throw ourselves into a musical snake pit and attempt to make our struggle look pretty for the audience. I’ll admit, tech week and show weekend is a little bit like that sometimes. Backstage can look like a warzone sometimes: dodging set pieces while running to your next entrance and simultaneously ripping off your costume and becoming an entirely new character all in the span of 45 seconds. But that’s what tech week is for; learning ...

It’s crazy and beautiful to think how fast you can connect with people. This has happened to me at times where I’m in an unfamiliar environment, I’m uncomfortable or nervous, or I don’t know anyone, like freshman year. Being a musical theatre major, you kind of have a built-in friend group, but I still was really timid and mostly kept to myself. But somehow through musical theatre classes and sorority recruitment, me and Jessica Eaton, a sassy, foul-mouthed, gorgeous girl from Boston, were drawn together. I don’t exactly remember the moment we became close, but all of a sudden we were like best friends. We would walk together to every sorority event, we sat next to each other in classes, ate together as often as we could, and we even set a friendaversary so we would have a special day out of each month just for the two of us. The funny thing is, Jessica and I were so different. Freshman year me was especially reserved, hesitant, quiet, and I didn’t feel like I had really found my...

We are now starting a new book in my social media class, “Measure What Matters: Online tools for understanding customers, social media, engagement, and key relationships.” This book by Katie Delahaye Paine gives step by step guidance on how to measure relationships as a small business or organization, focusing on the importance of data of all kinds. Just through reading the first few chapters I am seeing tips and tricks which apply to arts administration and it also reiterates things I’ve already learned in my other classes. I especially see the connection from this book to what I’ve learned about arts administration with the emphasis on the importance of surveys. Communicating with your audience or customers through surveys is crucial to any organization but I see it and learn about it first-hand with arts organizations. In order to keep a non-profit arts organization blossoming, you have to be making your audience happy, make them feel heard, and be constantly evaluating w...

Over the Easter weekend you might have heard about NBC’s latest live TV version of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. Fitting, as it musically portrays the last days of Jesus’s life, it aired on Easter evening and starred Sara Bareilles as Mary Magdalene, Brandon Victor Dixon as Judas, Alice Cooper as King Herod and John Legend as Jesus. I watched it and I was honestly blown away by the production. The vocals, orchestra, set, and lights were all incredible and there were definitely moments of me exclaiming, “I love musical theatre!” Most importantly, watching this production got me even more excited to see our very own ONU student production of Jesus Christ Superstar this coming weekend! If you didn’t already know, there will be performances of Jesus Christ Superstar in the ONU Chapel this Saturday, April 7 at 7:00pm and Sunday, April 8 at 1:00pm. This production is a little different for many reasons, with the biggest difference being that it’s ...

Though every week of my life is a week full of theatre, this week was jam packed. I had the pleasure of attending multiple different performances on top of my everyday rehearsal and acting classes. I was able to travel home and see my younger brother in his school’s living stations of the cross production (he played Jesus, which was amazing), as well as my sister in her high school’s production of “A Chorus Line.” Along with those two, I was able to see the Student Directed One Acts, “Love’s Fire,” here at ONU. I have seen and participated in many plays and musicals since my very first one when I was five year old. This week especially during everything I saw, along with the thoughts and emotions which were provoked in me by the content of the show, a few memories struck me during each experience. First during my brother’s reenactment of the last hour of Jesus’s life, as I watched the middle-school-aged kids onstage I was reminded how powerful children’s theatre can be. Some peopl...