by Ginger Morris
TAP Camp Director
Freelance Director/Choreographer/Educator/Manager
A revue is a type of multi-act theatrical entertainment that uses any combination of music, dance and sketches. When I create a revue, it is typically songs and dances from musicals strung together by a theme.
Are you struggling to produce a big musical every year or is there pressure to start doing musicals at your school? Here are a few reasons to consider producing a musical revue.
1. Role Distribution
In a musical, you have to cast people based not only on talent, but on “fitting a role.” You have to have the right people placed in the right places and often you sacrifice the talents of certain students for the personality or physicality of another. When you do a revue, you can cast as many people as can fit on your stage and it doesn’t matter if they fit a role. You can create a show around the students you have and you can showcase their individual talents.
2. Cost Effective
You don’t need a set or intense costumes. You can ask the students to wear something that ties them all together and looks uniform in nature but you don’t need to go through the trouble of renting, begging, borrowing or making costumes. As far as a set goes, you don’t need any scenery. If you want to get fancy, you can use a slideshow or just a backdrop, but if you have a cyclorama, just throw up a new color for each number and you are good to go!
3. Great training for future musicals (chorus and principals)
In a musical, often the same kids get the leads each year and the same kids stay in the chorus. There are probably some diamonds in the rough hanging out in the chorus who just need a little encouragement and need a little moment to shine before they are ready for a big role. So many times, I’ve given a short solo or duet to someone in a revue (who was not ready to play a leading role), and after having that experience, were ready to play a lead the following year. Also, you are training your chorus to be a better chorus and training your musical leads to be better chorus members. The more song and dance numbers you put in your show, the better your students will be in future musicals.
4. Team building
Unlike a full musical, there are no leads in a revue. It is up to you to distribute the solos however you like, so you may allow for more equal distribution and your students can feel like they are contributing to the final product as a team and not as leads and a chorus. If you already do a musical each year, this is a great way to get everyone on the same footing and working as a team before you work on the musical and things feel more divided.
5. Simple SchedulingYou can divide the students in so many ways based on dance ability, or vocal ability or age and you can schedule rehearsals in a way that is simple, only rehearsing one number at a time. You can wait until the week of the show to put all the separate groups together.
6. Introduce various styles and eras
When you choose a musical, you are choosing one style to introduce the students to. If you do Oklahoma!, you are learning the music of Rogers and Hammerstein and the dance style of classic American theatre. In a musical revue, you can do songs from a variety of shows. You can introduce songs from musicals that you couldn’t actually do at your school. You can do songs from Cole Porter’s Anything Goes and songs from In The Heights all in the same hour-long revue.
I have been organizing and directing musical revues for the last 15 years. It is a wonderful way to introduce a variety of songs and dances to a large group of kids in a fun ensemble style environment. Check back in a few weeks and I will give examples of revues I have produced with some pointers on producing your own.
