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Six Common Errors to Avoid

I recently had the pleasure of attending a performance of one of our plays, and the audience of families and friends loved it. But I knew that the kids, had they been given proper direction, could have put on a far more entertaining show. Here are some of the mistakes I noticed:

1. Do your students perform with the vocal version of our recording?

Trust me on this one. Your students are fully capable of singing with just the instrumental accompaniment. At the performance I saw, the teacher in charge of the sound system kept the recorded volume extremely low so the audience didn’t hear much of me singing. That’s fine, but we didn’t hear the instruments either, nor could the children easily hear the recording. And since they couldn’t clearly hear the music, they had trouble staying together.

2. Are your students passing around a portable microphone?

Nothing destroys the magic of theater quicker than watching performers pass around a microphone. In the case of this performance, every student had been instructed to turn off the mic after they said their line. So then the next student (and there were a lot of students) had to hunt for the switch, flip it on and then bang the mic a few times to make sure it was working. The solution is simple. If you must use microphones, put them on stands, and turn up the volume enough that many kids can be picked up simultaneously. This is called “area micing” and it will not disrupt the flow of your show.

3. Have you made it difficult for the audience to follow the story?

In this production it was hard to understand who was doing what and why they were doing it. It was almost as though the teacher had not really read the play before directing it. Be sure that you know what each character wants, so their words and action are consistent with their desires. In this show the audience thought the kids were cute, but they couldn’t have possibly have figured out what was happening onstage.

4. Are you performing with too many kids?

I know how this works: one teacher finds a play, and suddenly three other teachers want to join the fun. What could be wrong with that? Well, it means that almost all the kids have such small parts that the students’ attention will wander during the performance. They’ll miss their cues because they weren’t paying attention---and why would they, since each of them has such an unimportant role in the performance. Overlarge casts also cause teachers to make up new roles, and split the ones we’ve written. The result is usually a big, confusing, sloppy show. The easy solution is to have your class (and only your class) do the play. If another teacher wants to do the show, then they can do their own version of it.

5. Are you performing in your school’s multi-purpose room?

The biggest challenge in directing a play is teaching the kids to fill the room with their voices. There’s a great solution to this challenge: perform in your own classroom. Gone will be messing with microphones, scheduling hassles for the big room, and the wide space between performer and audience. An intimate venue makes it much easier to involve your audience in the story.

6. Are you making a big deal out of costumes and sets?

Sure, kids love costumes, but they make your job ten times harder. I strongly suggest having all the kids wear black tee shirts (turned inside out to obscure any printing). This shows they’re all performers. Then if you need more specific character cues, hang signs around their necks indicating who they’re playing. It sounds goofy, but the audience will immediately accept it.

We want you to have fun with the play, and we want you to have a great performance that the kids will remember and the audience will love. Give these suggestions a shot and you’ll be amazed at the improvement. And let us know how things worked—teachers are constantly coming up with great ideas that we want to share.

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