Dear Junior High Choir Teacher Whose Name Sounds Unfortunate When Chanted,
Remember the days when your shows were free? I do; I was in one. You’d have people standing at the exits at the end of the show to collect donations and make a joke about “it’s free to get in, but you have to pay to get out.” Nobody minded that. The shows might have been in libraries and cafeterias on roughly constructed sets, but everyone involved clearly had thrown themselves into it, and the quality was pretty damn good for a junior high show.
After the schools did that shift and the junior high moved to the old high school, you had a stage, not to mention double the amount of people to draw from, since now 7th and 8th graders were in the same school. You did The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, which went with your long-standing theme, but then you decided to break out of your usual mold of doing stage adaptations of Disney movies, and instead you decided to put on Annie. Everyone was astounded in a good way; it was an amazing production, with actual choreography, talented performers, and the technical quality was understandably above and beyond anything you’d done before. The only catch is, you started charging admission to cover the cost of the new technical work. I think the admission price was like $5 at this point, the same as the high school charged for their productions, so nobody cared.
The next year, you went a step further and did Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Once again, people were impressed. The year after that, Beauty and the Beast, breaking your own hard-and-fast rule about not repeating a show until the people who’d been in it the first time had graduated. But it was different, you said, because this was the stage version, not the adapted-from-a-cartoon version. This show was good, but not nearly as impressive as the previous two years.
It had begun, and I’d been able to see it coming ever since you set yourself such high standards with Annie. You were starting to one-up yourself again and again, and sooner or later you would reach the point where you couldn’t do that; couldn’t go any higher than what you’d already done.
The next couple of shows made me think that I was wrong. Cinderella, the Rodgers & Hammerstein version, was okay. The Wizard of Oz was, well, cringeworthy. I could tell that you were starting to cut some corners; the backup tracks for the songs still had the words on them half of the time. Not to mention that you cast your daughter in the lead, which I’m sure got some jealous grumbles from her fellow students. But, I was okay with all of this, because it seemed like you had reined it in a little and kept your shows within the bounds of what a junior high production could reasonably attempt.
Then, last year, you did The Sound of Music. Not the worst thing you could possibly do, but the idea of listening to a 13-year-old girl whose voice wasn’t nearly mature trying to hit the high notes in “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” made my head hurt just thinking about it. Not to mention, how many guys do you get in junior high whose voices have broken enough to sing Captain von Trapp? It seemed like a bad idea, and for the first time I deliberately did not get a ticket. I ended up helping with makeup one night as a favor, and the little bit of the first act I heard from backstage confirmed that I’d made the right decision.
Then, today, I get the news that you are doing Cats this year. I could explain to you why this is a bad idea - namely, that I’ve done this show with a bunch of junior high schoolers before, albeit as one myself, and although it might be something to do purely for fun like we did, if you want to have any sort of a professional-looking show, it’s just not going to work. It involves heavy dancing, for which I doubt you have a choreographer who’s up to par. The singing is constant; there is no dialogue, and you will completely exhaust these kids’ voices. Also, have you thought about the teasing the boys will endure when you tell them they have to wear spandex body suits?
This decision confirms for me a suspicion I’ve had about you for a long time - that you now care more about the lucrative potential of a show than the actual quality of the performance, or, indeed, the well-being of your students. If you force kids to sing songs that are not in their range - which, by the way, I’ve seen you do not only in your productions but in your cute little fundraiser revue shows - their voices will be damaged, maybe permanently. Furthermore, you seem to either not realize or not care that as your ticket prices have gone up (last one I checked was $12) the actual value of the ticket has gone down. More effort has gone into the spectacle of the show than into the performance, leading to a disappointed audience.
People get frustrated with you, sir. The high school drama department is frustrated with you because you constantly upstage their shows, or try to. The audience is frustrated with you for the reason stated above; if you sell someone a ticket for $12, you’d damn well better have the entertainment worth that $12. And I personally am frustrated with you for personal reasons, because you are a hypocrite and a sellout.
You act like I was one of your favorite students, and if you introduce me to someone, you usually include some hyperbolic claim about my vocal abilities; once you said something about how I was one of the top 5 voices you’d ever seen in one of your students. That can’t be true, since I was never the lead or even a character part in one of your shows, and you never asked me to be in one of your fancy “Sing America Sing” shows. You don’t really believe what you say about me, or you’d rather cast people based on something else, so stop pretending that I impress you so much.
And yes, you are a sellout. Rough as they were, I can say definitively that I enjoyed your shows much more when they were being performed in libraries and cafeterias with 2-dimensional sets and costumes that were only barely recognizable as what they were supposed to be. Rough is what a junior high play is supposed to be; it’s part of its charm. When you tried to upgrade these shows to Broadway levels of excellence, you must have known you were going to crash, but instead of admitting defeat, you’re going to crash your program into the ground trying to prove something to yourself and to the world.
You disappoint me.
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