CWETA and the amazing 24-hour musical

The Central Wisconsin Educational Theater Alliance wrapped up its first-ever 24-hour musical fundraiser event last Friday.

Students were given their roles as well as the name of the musical they would be performing upon arriving at the theater at 6 p.m. on Thursday evening.

From there, they had 24 hours to memorize their lines, blocking, choreography and music; put together a set; learn the layout of the theater; and maybe, hopefully, get a wink or two of sleep.

“They know they’re in a very unique — perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime — situation,” said Rick La Frombois, whose 13-year-old daughter was in the production and who was running on just as little sleep as the kids. “This has never been done before in Central Wisconsin, to anyone’s knowledge.”

The production, voted on from a selection of shows by donors to the event, was Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, based on the story of Joseph from the Bible. With a score by Andrew Lloyd Weber, the show’s story is told entirely through song.

Ayira Broadway, one of four narrators cast in the production, described the 24 hours of rehearsal leading up to the show as “pretty much non-stop.” Behind her, cast members practiced their vocal parts, lines and choreography in the background.

With an hour and a half before showtime, Broadway herself had gotten no sleep.

“Even on my breaks, I was rehearsing the solos that I didn’t have as much time on in vocal rehearsals, or sitting in a different blocking rehearsal for a different narrator who was working on a song or a dance, or something like that,” Broadway said. “It was also a lot of collaborating with my peers, where, you know, there’s harmonies with those songs that we can lock in with one another. It’s a lot of dedication and collaboration from everyone involved.”

The drive to put on a good show kept most participants on their feet even with the option to take naps.

“Are they tired? That’s an understatement. They’re exhausted,” said La Frombois. “They’re giving their all, and they probably are pushing themselves beyond what they’ve ever pushed themselves to before. It’s a challenge like they’ve never experienced before.”

“We gotta make sure people aren’t bored when they’re watching it,” explained 17-year-old Terrek Schjoth, who played Joseph in the production. His primary goal during rehearsal was to figure out how best to deliver the main beats of the show in a way that the audience could understand, whether he flubbed his lines or not.

The performance also had a live orchestra. The instrumentalists, like the rest of the cast and crew, were also given only 24 hours to familiarize themselves with the score.

“It’s just amazing growth the last five or six hours,” said Laurie Maegli, CWETA’s founder and the director of the production. “And the kids are all kind of spent, but it doesn’t matter, because now, an audience is coming in, and they will all find that extra adrenaline, and they are all so excited and so energetic, and we will get that one performance, because unfortunately, we can only do one, but it’ll be the absolute best they could possibly do. So the end product is always a reward.”