When A.L. Fortune Secondary teachers Michelle Reed and Colin MacDonald were preparing their students for this year's musical theatre production, Back to the '80s: The Totally Awesome Musical, one thing was clear: they'd need to familiarize the students with the decade, as all of them were 2000s babies born well after the era of shoulder pads, neon colours and the Rubik's Cube.
And so the Enderby high school class did some research. MacDonald brought in his dad's collection of vintage computer disks, a Nintendo Atari and other '80s relics. The teachers then showed the class the 1986 movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off, so that the students could get a sense of the way folks dressed and talked in those bygone days.
The research paid off as Back to the '80s delighted a total of eight sold-out audiences throughout the second week of December. The student performers captured the spirit of the decade with their on-point renditions of '80s music, their unmistakably '80s costumes, and their delivery of the word "radical," a throwback to a time before the word was bandied about as a political insult, to when it simply meant "cool."
The musical tells the story of the senior class of William Ocean High School, when 17-year-old Corey Palmer is madly in love with his next-door neighbour, Tiffany Houston, who is too busy swooning over Michael Feldman, the cool, popular and athletic kid at the school. The love triangle brings about plenty of intrigue, while moments such as a Star Wars dream sequence elicited a tonne of laughs.
In between a Sunday, Dec. 15 matinee show and the grand finale performance a couple hours later, Reed said her students had "grown so much" during the week of performances.
She added that after seven shows, they'd improved their comedic timing 鈥� and it helped that through their laughter, some of the older audience members revealed some jokes in the script that the students themselves weren't old enough to pick up on.
"They're all so young they didn't realize they were saying jokes, so when we had our first adult crowd it was like 'oh, this is a joke, I need to wait because the audience gets the reference,'" Reed said.
A total of 57 students from grades 9-12 took part in the production, with some on stage and others working behind the scenes.
Student Kai Yasaka was a behind-the-scenes stage tech crew member during last year's SpongeBob Musical production. This year he took to the stage, playing the lead character's friend, Kirk Keaton. He preferred being under the spotlight over being in the background this time around.
"Definitely it was more enjoyable to be on stage," Yasaka said.
The musical featured a number of '80s hits, including Wake Me Up Before you Go-Go by Wham!, Kim Wilde's Kids in America, Love Shack by the B-52s, Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun by Cyndi Lauper and many more classics.
"I'd heard a lot of these songs before and they just kind of pumped me up for this," Yasaka said.
This year's musical was the final production that Jacob Simpso will take part in as he's in his graduation year. For his high school swan song, he was assigned the lead role of Corey Palmer.
And no, he didn't get the role because of his fantastic '80s mullet.
Rather, he says he wrote Reed "a suck-up letter telling her how good I would do, and I think that tainted her decision-making," he joked.
Simpso played the supporting role of Mr. Krabs in last year's SpongeBob Musical and relished playing the lead role of a senior high school student in his own senior year.
With dreams of being an actor 脿 la Dwayne Johnson or Ryan Reynolds one day, Simpso is a natural in the spotlight.
"Singing's fun, dancing's fun. It's just being up there, that's the real big thing," he said.
It's the second year the musical theatre class has performed Back to the '80s after it was performed circa 2015. Reed and MacDonald decided to bring the musical back after the massive undertaking that was last year's SpongeBob Musical.
"We wanted something that would be a little bit more manageable set-wise, costume-wise, but that would still be fun for the audience, and you can't go wrong with the '80s," Reed said.
