The theater tech crew sizes up a frame for a doorway on the set. They cut an arch from a piece of wood and set it up over the center of the backdrop. Junior Allison Pea, a member of the lights crew, watches as power saws whir. 

Pea said, “(Lights crew) can’t really do anything until tech week, that’s when we make our cues and stuff.” 

Pea and her fellow crew members are preparing for the school’s spring musical, a shortened version of “Into the Woods,” will be performed on April 28 with a matinee for invited area grade schools, then open to the general public April 28, April 29 and April 30, all at 7 p.m., before finishing with a 2 p.m. show on May 1. All performances will take place in the school auditorium. 

Directly below Pea’s feet, a large, circular, wooden cutout sits visibly detached from the rest of the set. The musical will use a turntable as part of the set. Pea said, “There’s a little engine that powers it and a wheel that powers (the wheel).” An engine spins a series of wheels under a circular wooden surface on the set. Pea said, “The characters look like they’re moving but they’re actually on a turntable.”

The E period class has had its share of fun with the turntable. Pea said, “This one day during tech class, we put our feet on it and then we started spinning it and it was going so fast, we almost all flew off.”

According to Pea, the turntable is the first turntable since “Hairspray,” the musical cancelled two years ago due to the Covid-19 outbreak in the spring of 2020. Pea said, “We still had to assemble the top part of it (but) we had all the wheels already, the mechanism, the engine stuff.” She emphasized, “Even the screws are the same, but like the plywood is different. Everything else is pretty much the same.”

Pea said, “I actually really like this set a lot. I think it’s a really cool set.”