Although the CHS Drama Guild’s rendition of “Sweeney Todd” was supposed to be gloomy, the cast and crew did not anticipate performing half of the musical literally in the dark.

The Sunday matinee performance of this year’s spring musical was plagued by power outages that first threatened cancellation, then moved the performance from the original 2 p.m. time to 7 p.m. This inconvenience, however, was not the end of the “Sweeney” cast’s technological woes. Halfway through the late performance, the school’s power went out again, leaving the auditorium without a sound system and many of its stage lights.

Junior John Holland, who played Sweeney Todd, found himself mid-song when his microphone shut off, leaving him to keep singing without it.
“My first reaction was to the big ‘thump’ heard over the speakers as they stopped working,” Holland said. “Then, I thought, ‘Oh crap, we have no sound, and we are at the highest and most inaudible place on the entire set.’ A grim thing to think during a performance. I was definitely surprised and shocked that nature apparently hates Sweeney Todd, and will try to end it at all costs.”

While Holland kept things running smoothly on stage despite his lack of microphone, Matthew Millett was working the sound booth.

“[The power outage] affected the sound people more, and the radio-mic things we use to communicate with the people backstage stopped working,” Millett said. “So Lucy [Bowe] had to pull out her phone and text [the stage manager] Georgina [Kluser] to tell her what was going on and get John [Armstrong].”

Luckily, the power outage and intermission happened within minutes of each other. John Armstrong, Clayton’s technical director, immediately went on stage to announce that the show would go on.

Meanwhile, the backstage crew was working to make sure that everyone remained calm and that the actors would be heard by the audience.

“The camera that was on Mr. Blackmore did not have enough light to pick him up so the actors were not able to see him conducting, so we put a light on him,” junior Marin Klostermeier said. “The backstage crew’s primary job was to let the actors know what was going on and keep them calm. The main change was that we had to keep everybody backstage silent because any noise could be heard in the audience without the volume of the mics to cover it up. Also the pit orchestra played extra soft so the actors could be heard and so that Mr. Blackmore could hear the cues.”

Although the backstage crew had to stay busy to keep the show moving, the tech crew, without electricity to run their lights and sound, was left mostly jobless.

“John [Armstrong] pretty much just told us there was nothing we could do but sit back and enjoy the show,” Millett said. “The rest of the intermission I was doing annotations for ‘Black Boy.’”

The power outages that started with Sweeney Todd continued to plague CHS throughout the following week. It was discovered that a squirrel caused the power problems in CHS’s electrical wiring system. Head janitor Neil Cerrato helped to deal with the power outages.

“He was fried when they found him,” Cerrato said. “He was dead. Cooked. I think for some reason he was chewing on the wire a little bit at a time because the power went off three different times. The first time they just replaced the fuse. Then the second time the fuse went out they knew what to do, but they didn’t know why the same problem happened again. Then the third time they saw a long burnt line on the wire, so they knew something was wrong. They took apart the wiring and found the squirrel.”
Despite obvious setbacks, the cast and crew of Sweeney Todd seemed satisfied with their final performance.

“My impression was that the cast was very proud of themselves for going through half a show with almost no power,” Klostermeier said. “I too, was very proud of every single person involved. Everyone handled it like professionals, and all of the actors performed on stage like nothing had ever happened.”
Holland agreed.

“It was unlike anything we had had to go through before,” Holland said. “I certainly thought that through it all, everybody put in that extra effort to push ahead and finish the show with such a huge handicap, making the last show the best one since we had to make do with so little and finished out so great. I’m sure everybody (including me) thinks that they were cheated out of a full last show, but it was so great just being in such a versatile and resilient cast that the good outweighs the bad. Everything ended just the way it should end: with a funny and hectic bang.”