“Theatre is meant to spark emotion. All the pieces together, if done well, should create an emotional experience for the audience.” – Jon Christenson.
Chaska Valley Family Theatre (CVFT) has been busy putting all the pieces together to bring the musical comedy “Something Rotten” to the Chaska stage. The show is set in the 1590’s when brothers Nick and Nigel attempt to write the world’s first musical in an effort to compete with their rival Shakespeare.
“This show is very, very silly. There’s lots of bits that are extremely funny,” said Hanna Johnson, the technical director/set designer for the show.
A lot of people are involved to make a show like “Something Rotten” happen: directors, choreographer, costumer, producer and more. Johnson is one of those people. She started working in community theatre back in high school along with her parents in Northfield, MN.
Johnson has been active with CVFT since 2017 and is currently president of the CVFT board of directors. She has also been working as a part-time theatre specialist for the Eastern Carver County Schools for the past year.
Her past experiences have informed the way she works with students. Her advice is, “Try something, then try something else.”
Another CVFT regular is Jon Christenson working on light and sound design. Christenson has been involved with theatre since high school. He’s played viola in the pit orchestra and performed on stage but most of his work has been off-stage.
He started doing light and sound work with the Sauk Rapids community theatre alongside his family. Christenson has been involved with CVFT since 2007 and he’s been employed by Eastern Carver County Schools as a theatre specialist since 2015. Christenson says he really enjoys training students to do light and sound work for both high school auditoriums.
Audiences are most familiar with the singing and dancing that they see on stage, but there’s so much more going on behind the scenes.
“There’s a ton of infrastructure to make it happen,” Johnson said.
There’s the stage manager who tells the light and sound people what to do, as well as tech crew that make sure the actors get the right props and set pieces on stage on-time. There are student workers actively mixing sound for the singers and the pit orchestra, making light cues happen on-time and sending video footage backstage for cues.
Building the set for this particular show was challenging because there are so many different locations required for the plot. Johnson says they solved this problem by relying heavily on props to tell the story. They also use the same set pieces in different ways, like how the outside of the theatre set opens up to reveal the inside of the theatre. Johnson also enjoys using prop and set pieces from other shows to create “Easter eggs” for the audience to find.
“Something Rotten” has a non-traditional pit, more like a rock band. There are three keyboards that require the use of the computer audio software Mainstage which then has to be mixed by the sound crew. There are also guitars, drums, saxophones, trombone, trumpet and violins.
Christenson says the biggest challenge is putting it all together very quickly. They have just 10 days to build the set, program the sound and lighting and then rehearse everything together with the pit and the actors.
“Something Rotten” is opening this weekend at the Chaska High School auditorium. Tickets can be purchased at the door or online (https://www.cvft.org/somethingrotten).
Showtimes for “Something Rotten”:
- March 28: 7 p.m. April 4: 7 p.m.
- March 29: 2 p.m. & 7 p.m. April 5: 2 p.m. & 7 p.m.
- March 30: 2 p.m. April 6: 2 p.m.
