The Azle High School performing arts program is bringing its Fall 2024 production of “Mary Poppins: The Broadway Musical” to the auditorium tonight and tomorrow at 7 p.m. with two more weekend shows at 2 p.m. After months of learning lines, designing costumes and props and perfecting scenes, students are ready for their first performance.
Playing the title role, senior Lyla Castro has put a lot of effort into really knowing how to act as this character in her first musical production.
“I feel kind of honored to be playing such a well-known character, but there is pressure to kind of do her justice, especially for all these people who grew up with her and know how magical she is,” Lyla said. “Once tech week hits, everything is going to fall into place and start to come together.”
Junior TJ Bradford plays Bert, the jack of all trades, and they are a hair and makeup co-head along with junior Grace Justice. TJ has been in theatre for three years, having lead roles in UIL One-Act plays, but Bert is their first lead in a big production.
“It’s taken a lot of memorizing my songs and going over and over them to make sure I know every note, and [I need to be] able to change it to fit into my interpretation of Bert and a lot of working on the choreography,” TJ said. “It’s a lot of work with, especially, Lyla because she is Mary Poppins and we have to, you know, be into each other, but I’m not into women, so it’s hard. We have had to learn and become really close through that.”
Rebecca Crabtree, the theatre teacher and this show’s director, is in charge of the overall creative vision of the production. She has to oversee all of the crew and actor elements to ensure they are cohesive and fit together nicely. In addition to directing, Crabtree also creates choreography for the show. She explained that building this program would be a very long process.
“Throughout the summer, I worked on some of the technical designs and started choreographing,” Crabtree said. “We had auditions the first week of school and started rehearsing immediately.”
Logan Leach, the sound head and designer works on mixing mics, making sound cues, verifying sound and mic volume and communicating with the stage managers. Logan has always been interested in sound tech and joined theatre last year. Logan said that there are certain steps to being able to perform the music on stage.
“We had to buy the soundtracks through Disney, and we have to use this thing called an MTI player to run and play the tracks because there are specific production tracks,” Logan said. “And we can’t steal them because that’s illegal.”
The theatre program has put a considerable amount of effort into the production of this show and they could not do it without the support of the Azle community.
“We have so many different little groups of people that come together to make this one big giant thing happen,” Lyla said, “and we couldn’t do without each and every person involved.”
