Our Halloween Musical is well on its way to being ready for opening day!

Although Halloween was officially Monday, our performance date is set for Tuesday November 8th. Between trick-or-treating and our harvest festival at UCP, we had plenty planned for October 31st already!

In The Making of our Halloween Musical ~ Part 1, I shared how the children came up with the story line and how they designed the tickets, programs, and background scenery.

Today, I’m going to share with you some more pictures and some music from the musical. Enjoy!

Making tickets

The children used paint and stamps to decorate tickets. Then we went around to sell tickets to the staff members at UCP. This was great practice for using our communication skills!

 

We practice…

We practice three times per week for 30 minutes. We want the children to be extremely comfortable with being in the room where we’ll have the show. We also want them to be extremely comfortable with all those lines and songs!

and practice…

and practice!


(I have that silly look on my face because this little guy had just said his lines independently for the first time! Celebration!)

MUSIC

Here are some samples of the music we’ll be using…

As our narrator begins the story, there will be organ music playing to set the spooooky mood (i.e. I set my oh-so-versatile Yamaha keyboard to ‘organ’ under voice settings)

If you read the story line from Part 1 of this series, you also know that our main characters, the trick-or-treaters, run into two groups of animals as they try to find their way out of the woods…owls and spiders. Have a listen to the songs the children will sing as they are met by the trick-or-treaters…

While some of the children are acting and singing, we have one class that is solely dedicated to using instruments to make our sound effects. In the play, our narrator reads the following as a reoccurring line as the children play their instruments….

“The trick-or-treaters walked and walked (children play DRUMS for footsteps). The wind blew (children play WIND CHIMES)….the leaves rustled (CABASA and SHEKERE)…and they heard a sound!”

Meanwhile, I am playing the following on the keyboard to cue the sound effects instrumentalists musically, as well…

 Can you tell which piano phrase is for footsteps? for wind? for leaves?

Stay tuned for the final installment of the series “The Making of Our Halloween Musical.” I will be sure to post pictures of the final product! The children have worked SO hard and I’ll be happy to share their success!

* The organ music, “Spider Song,” and sound effects were composed by me; the “Owl Song” was composed by my wonderful intern, Meaghan.