Unspoken (tech) heroes

Throughout the year, Samo tech kids are hard at work. With three productions spanning a total of nine months, technical theatre is no easy feat. So much goes in to pull off a show that these students are often overlooked for all the work they put in. Like their acting counterparts, they too spend hours after school working to make the show what it is. While not center stage, their work remains salient to the production, falling under a myriad of jobs; such as set design, props, audio and lighting. Their most recent undertaking has been with Samo’s upcoming musical, “How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.”Stage managers Robbie Levis-Fitzgerald (‘19) And Rachel Lamell (‘19) have worked feverishly to oversee the tech students, ensuring the show’s smooth running.  “We put a lot of work in,” Levis-Fitzgerald said. “We help with scheduling, building the set, lights, mics, and sounds.”With a good portion of the show falling on their shoulders, tech has had to make sure everything is perfect. To ensure this, the group of students has worked meticulously to keep everyone on task.“In tech, you have to manage and call out multiple things at once and manage many different people. If anything goes wrong, it is always blamed on us,” Levis-Fitzgerald said.While the job of the stage manager is tough, Lamell believes it all comes down to the people they work with.“[The show] is stressful because everything is reliant on the management team making the right call,” Lamell said. “However, all the people are great and, most of the time, very easy to wrangle.”Stressing the amount of time they have put into this show, Levis-Fitzgerald and Lamell believe without tech their would be no show. “We put in a lot of extra work that goes pretty unnoticed by most people. We're there hours early to set up and we stay sometimes past midnight to strike it all and clean up,” Lamell said.  Each production, they put in work that mirrors that of the cast. In order for a production to be at its best, it is important for tech to be at its best and they have done just that with “How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.”