From November 30th to December 3rd, Cherry Hill West put on its performance of A Christmas Story: The Musical. After beginning rehearsals in early September, and set construction starting in October, the cast and crew of the West Theater Department put on their show for four days, with the audience enjoying the performance. The Theater Department, led by Mrs. Carolyn Messias and Mr. Cooper Gorelick, with musical director Mr. Blaze Dalio and student director Gaby Creighton, began their year of theater with a show retelling the 1985 movie of the same name of Ralphie, a boy who wants a BB gun for Christmas and the adventures he goes through on the 25-day countdown to Christmas.

With a rigorous three months to put together a show and build a set, the actors were under some stress. But it seemed it paid off, said actors Olivia Madison and Alex Santos, who played the Mother and Old Man respectively. Olivia shared about how “once we got to act 2, it started coming together,” with Alex then adding that “everything came together beautifully and I’m so happy with the way that we, especially me and Liv were able to like, you know, create the homefeel… it was really awesome.” 

This opinion also came from Gaby and Mr. Dalio, the student director and music director respectively, who expressed their opinions about the show. Dalio talked about the difficulty of the music and how “music directing A Christmas Story was, a highlight of my Cherry Hill West career… the music is a little harder than some of the music that we’ve done vocally than some other shows, but the students rose up and it was awesome… one of my favorite parts was when, a grown man, came in the pink bunny costume, it shows how much people care about this show.” Gaby talked about her experience with the young students in the show, talking about how she enjoyed “getting to work with a bunch of the elementary schoolers and middle schoolers and I got to teach them a couple songs… It was silly and it was great and it really reinforced the idea that I have that I want to be a music teacher… it went amazingly, it was so much fun… and I think the audiences really liked it.”

From a more technical point of view, stage manager Ella Sumner, who was the manager in charge of lighting and sound cues, as well as being in charge of stage blocking and notes, said that “stage managing went well… the process of blocking the scenes, writing down stuff, covering lines and getting all of that stuff together… it went very smoothly.” 

Further information about the building and movement of the main set component, the house that the main family lives in, came from Mr. Gorelick who stated that, with help from Mr. Frost, “came up with the design, very very detailed blueprints, that were made by an architect, everything fit together very logically. It was one of the more complicated sets we’ve done in a long time. We had 6 major rolling set pieces and other things that came on and off… We had a great crew of around 70 people… it was a great production, I have been told, and Mrs. Messias has been told that people were wowed when the first curtain came up and, there was a whole house there.”

With the opinion so high of the Theater Department after this show, they will continue the year with Romeo and Juliet in the winter and The Sound of Music in the spring.