![SNAP HAPPY Recording on a GoPro for social media, senior Sam Mellon has recently started a weekly sports podcast. “[Senior] Brendan Feeney and I have been talking about doing a sports podcast forever. We love talking about sports and we just grabbed [senior] Will Hanas and went along with it,” Mellon said.](https://mhsnews.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/sam-892x1200.png)
For the first time ever, students from elementary, middle and high school are coming together for their production of the Wizard of Oz. Since COVID, there hasn’t been a live orchestra pit for any plays, but this show will be using one again.
“All the kids from the other schools are ensemble, they have to be in the Honors choir to be in the show,” freshman Henry Drapac said. “It’s different because it’s the first kind of show that we’ve decided to work with the other schools, instead of just MTC.”
Working with all the younger students has never been done to this extent before, but it has been going well.
“So it’s actually going a lot smoother than I even anticipated,” theater teacher Rayomd Palasz said. “I knew it was gonna be okay, but I feel like there weren’t as many challenges as I was expecting to kind of, crop up.”
Almost all the younger students in the play have been involved in honors choir or had some sort of experience, so it makes it easier for them to work in tandem with the high schoolers.
Another unique factor in this play is the live orchestra pit, which hasn’t been incorporated into a show since 2019.
“Typically we play tracks through the sound booth through our speakers. I would say it’s a unique challenge because there’s a greater margin of error, but they’re doing insanely well considering the time they’ve been given,” senior Logan Hayes said.
Even without the prerecorded sound tracks, the technical side of things are essential to the show.
“Glinda comes floating inside this bubble, how do you create that on stage? The wicked witch, you know, fires these fire balls. How do you do that on stage? We have pyrotechnics. There’re those moments on the technical side of things that provide the challenge, but we’ve overcome that.” Palasz said, “I really hope students come out and see it because it’s really been a tremendous undertaking, not just from students who are in theater program, but our students who are in the technical theater classes who have spent a lot of time this semester designing and building stuff.”
