The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a story of Ichabod Crane coming to a small town that experiences many strange happenings. In this play, we follow Ichabod through his journey of teaching, romance, frights, and overcoming his fears. This week, the Twilight Players will perform The Legend of Sleepy Hollow at 7:30 pm Thursday through Saturday, and will end their performances with a matinee at 2:00 pm Sunday afternoon. This will be my first Twilight Players performance experience.
Theater has been a part of my life since I can remember; even when I wasn’t performing for a show, I was watching my older sister perform. She is the one who started my interest in theater, and for that, I will be forever thankful because it has helped me find my true passion in my life, as cliché as it sounds.
I am enrolled at NVU-Lyndon due to my experience in sound design in past theater performances. I quickly discovered after my first musical that audio engineering was my favorite thing to do. So, I decided to major in audio production despite the program not being geared toward the kind of sound design I wanted to do.
This is where the Twilight Players came in. I knew what I was walking into when I chose this major, but I still needed to have the sound design that I know and love. Coming to a school that has an audio production major made me believe I most likely wouldn’t be able to run sound right away, but after I had talked to some of the Twilight Players’ executive board members, my hope quickly grew as I realized they didn’t really have anyone to run the soundboard. I had missed a lot of opportunities due to COVID, so coming to a college and being able to run sound was a dream come true.
It’s no secret that this industry, not just Twilight Players, was hit hard by the pandemic. Our club lost, essentially, every single member of their club, so they were forced to start anew, which is no easy task on top of dealing with the lack of experience in performing because of COVID. Their budget got decreased, they have a new director, and basically an entirely new executive board.
Regardless, everyone has put in a lot of effort for this show. Everyone involved took time out of their schedules and spent about 12 hours a week in rehearsals. This may not sound like a lot, but with having classes, jobs, homework, and other clubs and events, it is a lot of time spent. This doesn’t even include time spent outside of rehearsals learning lines, brainstorming props, or any other aspect of the show that has needed to be worked on.
From a sound design standpoint, I have had to put a lot of work into the show myself, much more than I was used to, at least. I have had to find about 37 sound effects for this show alone, not including the sound effects that were scrapped or the time spent trying to edit sound effects to make them work. It was a lot of effort, and frustrating at times, but it will all be rewarding at the end of this week after we are done with our shows.
This show is more than worthy of big audiences for each show- it’s funny, spooky, and entertaining all at the end time. Regardless of the hardships the Twilight Players have experienced these past couple of years, they have pushed hard to do a lot of work behind the scenes for this show. Everything has been thought out deeply to help us prepare for our show next semester, The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow will be free admission, but donations will be gratefully accepted to help the club prepare for Rocky Horror. For those of you who don’t know, this is a very major show for our club to put on, especially on a small budget.
I believe I speak for the entire cast when I say that we will appreciate every person who comes to our show whether they enjoy it or not.
Photo by Evan Colman || The cast and crew of Sleepy Hollow work with the director, Michael Kane, during their first rehearsal of tech week.