WGHS Theater Past Shows (Fall 2006-Present): 2026 Winter Musical "SIX" (Teen Edition)

The WGHS Theater Department decided to take on the challenge of an amzing show about the six ex-wives of King Henry the VIII. It was a side project for the department and we started in the Spring semester the year before. We knew this one would need a lot of time to prepare...and boy were we right.

It was a unique project for the Theater Department;

small cast and crew, live pop band, and lots of dancing!

The poster design for the show

AUDITIONS

We held a round of auditions in the Frick Theater in the Spring to get the cast picked and to allow them to get acquainted with the music over the Summer months.

We had a great turn out of students interested in the show. Picking the six actors really fell on who could sing the songs well and bring honesty to their character. The script and score for this musical are very unique and the show asks something special from its actors, band and techies. It is a an all-girl-group pop concert parody, a dramatic play, an extremely smart social satire, and a bit of a farce.

We used the auditions to test the actors on the difficulty of the music and their range as singers. We then had to step back. After an initial cut, the casting table had to predict who would be best to tell this story.

The final selection of the cast was a very important choice,

and the outcome would depend on building the right team.

We found the six perfect actors for these roles. Each one of them knocked their songs out of the park in the audition and gave us a moment of honesty. However, not all of them got the queen they were expecting.

The Queens: Jeni (facing away), Amelia, Chloe, Lilly, Mimi, and Rin

THE CREATIVE STAFF

Mr Schaefer was going to be rather busy with R & J in the Fall, so he was able to just act as producer on this one, and joined the team in Jan as a mentor to the designers and the student director.

We were super fortunate to have Mrs. Alley Dickens with us on this journey as Head Choreographer and the adult in the room. She was able to bring her new baby Henry to rehearsals too. It was so much fun to have a future theater kid in the room!

Charlotte Snell was the Student Director (and Independant Study Student). Our stage manager was Selby Caldwell. The team stayd pretty tight through the Fall. Then we added more to help after Winter break as we got closer to opening.

Selby Caldwell (SM) and Charlotte Snell (DIR)

Dance is a huge element in the show, and so we had dance captain/choreographer Miraim Yau working on the choreo of certain songs, and Martha Poppen joined the team after R & J closed to assist in some of the choreo as well.

All these amazingly talented people

working together made for a dream team.

We had some of the best, if not the BEST singing and dancing from a cast in any WG Theater Department show over the last 23 years. The choreography was spectacular and it the made the experience for the audience absolutely electric.

Every song challenged the cast and band with a new style. Musically, we got to play in contemporary, jazz, pop, lyrical, opera, hip hop, and musical theater. There are no other shows quite like this one.

The whole production staff, cast, crew, and band for "SIX"

WITH A SPECIAL SHOUT OUT TO:

ECHO PENTZ (not pictured) for making the collars for Haus of Holbien, for making the crowns, and for designing the upstage window cut outs that finally made it to the stage for Sat night's show!

REHEARSALS

We were very fortunate with the show that it didn't have a big set and we were able to put the Queens in several rehearsal spaces easily.

The full team present and working hard. Hank on piano, Mrs Dickens in the pit,

Miriam and Martha stage left ready to step in, and the Queens working on their moves.

They needed the risers from the very beginning of the process staging the show. We borrowed a set of three from Choir, and we moved them into the Black/White Boxes or onto the Aud stage for rehearsals. It was easy and fast to make quick location adjustments. With another full main stage production also working in the department at the same time, we had to make sure everyone had the space they needed to work.

Mrs Dickens and the dance captains were able to see spacing much easier on the Aud stage. The lighting system also allowed us to make some sample light cues to begin seeing

how we wanted to approach the light focus.

Miram and Mrs Dickens working in the pit as the cast works on stage.

The dancing required everyone to be present and they also all had to do

quite a bit of self rehearsal to get all of the choreo learned on time.

Hank Yau was the Musical Director, and because they had rehearsal tracks he could join the rehearals when he could to help make sure everything was lining up!

Mostly we rehearsed in the White Box, it has the mirrors

The band was meeting on their own as we got closer to opening and played through the score.

Mr Timn Yau (far left) joined the students, offered some supervision, and played electric guitar.

The Queens would join the band to test the muscial numbers and held several sitzprobes as we got closer. The band room made that part of the process very easy. Mr. Cole would set up mics for us to use so that the singers could be heard. They use mics now a lot with singers in Jazz I and Chloe (Jane Seymour) is singing with them regularly during her senior year.

STAGING and BLOCKING

The risers were great, they allowed for use to use 6 acting/staging areas
and gave us a lot of opetions for different levels.

Charlotte was given the challenge to always keep the stage picture different, exciting to look at,
and unexpected for the audience.

Chloe testing a cross from SL, while Charlotte works through some new blocking.

The show has a lot of small scenes that play out between numbers, but we never leave the "concert" premise and the Queens have to bounce between each other's stories to tell the big story. It is a challenge for any director to keep everything in mind as they decide on the stage picture and when the characters need to move toward their objective. The scenes also fluctuate between styles and tone. The audience never knows whats coming next.

Charlotte working with the queens on some of the scenework

The design team and staff started attending more rehearsals once R & JK closed in Nov.

There was a lot to figure out with lighting and costumes. There were also some specialty props that needed to be made. Then there were the microphones...we couldn't decide whether to use hand helds or lavs. We settled on using ACA's hand held system. Thank you to Mr Dunn!!!

COSTUMES

The Costumes were a character in the show and each queen was color coded to refect a mood of their story. We had Dana Buchanan, a wonderful student designer who took on the challenge of designing these very elaborate characters with Mr Schaefer. We used some stock, shopped from Savers and ordered some stuff online.

The two designers had to work together to imagine the six queens, and essentially they had to sculpt the looks using several pieces of woman's fashion (cut into new pieces), different kinds of trim, and a lot of hot glue. We did hand sew and machine sew a lot too, but we used the glue guns to secure many of the decorations. Mrs Dickens also assisted in the styling by giving us a thrid eye and pair of hands on the work.

Spencer lived in the White Box...which became our design studio for the costumes.

We aimed for a Tudor style with the final look, but we also had to lean into the 90's Girl's Pop group asthetic. The costumes had to be fitted on the actors constantly. We were trying to tailor them to the actor and also allow them to move the way they needed for the choreo. This took some work.

The inspiration for the Tudor style came from some patterns we found on line...just to get the silloette. The facny white Elizabethan collars were made by Echo Pentz. We ordered the light up glasses online.

They all started with a little black dress (except Anne of Cleves) and then we added the color/sparkle on top of that. The nod to the Tudor style came last as we built the rolled sleeves.

Mimi's costume started with the corsette and a little black dress. We added a crinoline, the sleeves from a shirt, and took a panel out of the front of the skirting. Her color was pink.

Chloe's costume also went through a transition. We had initially had her in a white skirt and ended up doing a similar cut to Mimi's but stiftened the boarder of her skirt with ribbon and put a short black skirt under it. Getting her sleeves right was the challenge, and then we added the gloves.

Amelia's costume was a combination of three dresses and a belt corsette. She also got a crinline to poof out the skirt a little. She intentially has "GREEN" sleeves.

We also added a jeweled B on her chest for her character's last name.

Lilly Hodel's costume had to have a tear-away jacket and biker shorts, Rin's costume had to have pants and we took a bit getting her bolero jacket completed, and Jeni's costume was just a lot of gold!

The costume team worked right up to opening, adding all kids of little things to the costumes to make them look as cool as they could. By the the time the SIX QUEENS hit the stage they all looked like royalty! Each one was unique, sparkled, and looked stuck between that time and ours.

PR and MARKETING

We had quite a bit of marketing used to sell the show. We made posters, flyers, a banner, wore T-shirts, and used slides in annoucements and on the hallway monitors. The Senior display was also decorated into our show's marquee.

The Cast and some of the Creatives got a shirt with white vinyl letters that really popped. We made a second set of our normal shirts with a black screened logo.

This is Charlotte's 4th(?) banner she has painted for the department. It turned out great and really helped to spread the word we had a show going on. With only 6 actors in the show, you have to push the marketing a little harder.

Senior display case was used as our marquee again and we really made it sparkle.

We also decorated the dislay case coming out of the Library

to attract even more attention on the upcoming production.

LIGHTING

The lighting for this show is expected to wow the crowd like a pop concert would. We had been given 2.5 million in tech updates the year before and this was the show to test the new setup.

Colin Nicholl adding two proscenium arch twinkle-light boarders to the stage.

Colin Nicholl was the Lighting Designer and Master Electrician on the show. He had a huge lift on this one, the cues had to come fast and quick. There were all kinds of cues tied to the beats in the show, movements of the queens and words spoken. The timing was everything. Luckily we had time to work in the space and we had the opportunity to bring in some pro help to give us pointers on some of the new tricks we wanted to do. It worked out great and the lighting was a huge feature in the final performance.

We achieved some amazing moments with some really saturated colors.

The disco ball and dancing rainbow lights on the cyc was a favorite look when they all sang a song together. We also created cool cut outs for the risers that were also backlit with LED lighting instruments. It looked like a Pop concert with a Tudor nod.

HAIR and MAKE-UP

The show needed the Queens to look color coded but also from the same universe. The actors and prep team did a great job working together to make them look like pop stars. We had litght weight crowns made by Echo. Mr Schaefer picked up some glitter make-up.

Mostly the prep team made it happen in the dressing room each night by working together. Mrs Dickens, Madi Clark, Miriam and Martha all helped in various ways. They were using hand held mics so we didn't have to deal with setting wireless mics through hair. That took a lot of the pressure off the prep.

The Dressing room is where the magic happened each night!

Every Queen had different hair style. There were pony tails, up-dos, little buns,

braids, and long flowing curls

Jeni just getting started in the mirror

Charlotte was great at keeping the ship going forward towards our goal

TECH REHEARSAL SUNDAY

We only had one day were we brought in the band and held a full tech run on stage with all of the light cues and running the show straight-through. The energy was high!

Selby and Colin pushing through!

Kashti and Atlas (Follow Spot Ops) Lilli, Hank and Mr Yau

Our tech Sunday lunch break. We did great that day and the show really found its legs!

Thanks to Mrs. Snell for all of the pizza!

There were not a ton of props in the show.

This is the phone case that Anne B. uses to take her selfies.

These are shots that Amelia took at one of the shows...

first a selfie with the audience and then one with the Queens.

The other props we used were a frame, light up glasses, two confetti cannons and a gold crown.

BACKSTAGE BEFORE THE SHOW

There were cast, crew and band (Ladies in Waiting) all backstage working on different things.

Myles Thompson stepped in to paint the faces of the band members.

The band also wore Tudor style outfits and several wore blonde wigs

to try an trick the audience into thinking we had a female band.

Myles is friends with many on the production team and had just closed a successful run of R & J and wanted to help out. They all looked great after he was done doing their make-up each night.

Each night the band would arrive and jam before they transformed into their characters

Mimi getting ready for the show!

Madi helped get Amelia's hair up in buns!

Selby waiting for the show to get started, and Dana making sure everyone is dressed and nothing broke in the process. We had a few fix-its with costumes and crowns

through the 3-night run of the show.

Mrs Dickens was a huge help in getting the Queens ready each night!

Rin's costume was the last one finished before we opened.

We changed up the skirting at the last minute to give her a more Tudor style skirt.

We have mic checked and we are ready to go!

Our Box Office Team with Poppy as House Manager

Mason also sold some treats as a fundraiser.

Once the dressing room emptied out we knew we were close to the show starting

The pre-show huddle...

SHOW PICTURES

Ex-Wives!

Jeni Car-Schwartz

NO WAY!

Amelia Ornstein

Sorry not sorry...don't lose your head!

Chloe Bronner

My Heart of Stone

Welcome to the Haus of Holbien...

JAH!

Lilly Hodel

I didn't look like my profile picture...

  GET DOWN!!!

ANNA!!!


Henry the VIII and his 4 wives!

Mimi Mueller

I'm a ten amongst these threes...

Rin Blank

I don't need your love...no...no!

Can we try something different tonight?

I Don't Need Your Love...

FIVE More Minutes!
We're SIX!