seabury hall performing arts

drama
at seabury
k Did
you realize...
this might be the
last time you sit
in this building
With the new Creative
Arts Center on the
way, this year we bid
farewell to our dear
old tin box, the PAS.
Ou t o f t h e P. A.S. t
Did you know…The Performing Arts
Studio (PAS) used to be the school’s gym And
the “Green Room” (which doubles as the
dressing room) was the Weight Room There
are still a few clues to the PAS’s past life as
a gym. If you walk behind the “cyc” (that
big light blue cloth at the back of the stage)
you’ll see the steel column that held the big
basketball hoop — still padded to protect
players sailing down from flying lay-ups.
Did you know…That before it became
the costume facility, the upstairs was the Band
Room Trumpets blared upstairs while whistles
and slapped volleyballs downstairs made
the old tin gym into a huge tin drum.
“You couldn’t hear yourself think in
there,” remembers Director Sally Sefton-
Johnston. The acoustics were a nightmare. “I
thought, will we ever be able to hear anyone
with all this echoing”
But in came carpet and heavy drapes on
the walls (and ceiling!), out went the hoops
and bags of volleyballs . The real sound test
was when Assembly moved in and that first
6 th grader stood up to squeak out a Happy
Birthday wish to her friend — and finally
everyone could hear it!
“It was a miracle,” remembers
Sefton-Johnston, who has come to love
working in the PAS for its intimacy. “It’s the
most intimate theater on Maui — where the
audience is closest to the actors. It’s great for
drawing people into the emotional lives of
the characters on stage.”
And it almost didn’t happen: the present
gym, in its planning stages, had a theater
attached to the front. Why didn’t we build
that Because a performing arts program is not
just in what you see (a nice stage and comfortable
seats) it’s in what you don’t see: rehearsal
rooms, changing rooms, costume-making,
prop-making, set-building, painting, etc. A
theater isn’t just a showroom, it’s a factory.
In April of 1995, we opened the PAS
with the musical Anything Goes. The last
few days running up to the opening were
pretty frantic. The seating platforms weren’t
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