Power outage doesn’t stop high school theatre production

BLACKFOOT, Idaho (KIFI)- During the opening weekend of Snake River High School's performance of Footloose: the Musical will be memorable for the cast, crew, and many in attendance. Not just for the performance itself, but for a unique situation that occurred during the Saturday night rendition.

During the performance, a power outage disrupted the production at Snake River High School Auditorium, where the musical was being hosted.

" I was like, I don't know what to do next. Like, do we keep going or what? And then we all kind of just sat down and started asking the people what they wanted to do, and then kind of just all went from there. We started with the opener, which was super cool doing it a cappella, made it sound really cool, and it was a unique experience, to say the least," said Chris Robinson who plays Ren McCormick in the musical.

"First thing that came to my mind was, Oh, crap. And then after that, I was like, Well, someone's got to say something. So I said my line, and then everyone laughed. So that was kind of Fun," said Tyler Gillians who plays Willard Hewitt.

"We hadn't quite finished Ariel's costume change, so it gave us a minute to do up her pants and to zip up her boots in the dark so that was great. We all kind of panicked and weren't sure what to do," said Jadey Phillips who plays Rusty.  

The unusual situation left the cast and crew behind the production of two choices.

1. Stop the performance for the night.

2. Improvise lighting and find a new way to continue the show.

The brave students behind the show decided in a true thespian fashion that the show must go on. For lighting, they decided to use flashlights from their phones as lighting and projected their voices as best they could.

"The kids just started singing. And as they were singing, you could tell that their energy was picking up and they were really enjoying it. And the audience, you could just tell that they didn't want to leave because they were enjoying it as well," said Kevin Godfrey who was in the audience Saturday Night.

Power did eventually come back, just in time for the grand finale of the performance allowing them to use the preprogrammed lights for the rest of the performance.

Jenna Mcbride the production's director said she was overwhelmed by her students. "There aren't words for how proud I am of them. Really? There's no way to tell them how amazing I think they are."

She added that the audience really rallied behind the cast and supported them through it. "Somebody had a couple of Bluetooth wireless handheld mikes, and we handed them to the kids and they did the show with a little speaker and a couple of handhelds and I don't know, there the audience actually responded more. The energy was higher than normal."

But what makes the night truly unique for all involved? Is that it will be a night that no one will forget. "That it was pretty scary. But yeah, definitely didn't happen. Like or I guess and I never really thought of anything like that happening. It was all kind of just like, Yeah, I'm just going to do what I did last night. The better," said Robinson.

"This one will definitely stick out for me. You know, just seeing the amazing support of the community and everyone, just their love of the theater and everyone else here that helped out with the show, it was amazing to see," said Gillians.

"This is a story we'll share," said Godfrey.

"You're probably not going to lose power again and it's not going to be as good as it was during the performance," said Alex Clark a crew member for the production.

The show will continue to play on the 20th, 21st, 24th, and 25th of March. All shows start at 7.00 p.m. and will be at Snake River High School.