Behind the Curtain: The Journey of Mamma Mia!

Behind the Curtain: The Journey of Mamma Mia!

By: Leonel Graciano Lie – 11 St. Ernest

This is Bill Austin signing in as your reporter of the Mamma Mia secondary production on the 9th of July, by Stella Maris School GS. Now, of course my real name isn’t Bill Austin, i’m Leonel of class 11 st. Ernest. It has been a pleasure acting as Bill, alongside my fellow colleagues, and here’s why.

I have had extensive experience with musicals, though never as one of the main cast. I was chosen as an MC one time, another time as the design team (2-3 years ago), so this whole acting thing was really new to me, in fact to a lot of us. 

I still remember joining the first few sessions, thinking that whatever practice we’re doing at the time was definitely something that I didn’t expect for training for a play. We had a script reading as our first practice session I recall, I thought it was just gonna be a sit-down and memorize your lines session. Rather, we all had to read aloud the dialogues from beginning to end, in character. I was really shocked as at the time, we were still awkward with each other, not knowing who plays who, but everyone just decided to be professional and act their character. Thats when I realized that this is it, its all or nothing. I didn’t even know what Bill’s personality was like, and how I’m supposed to get into his character, luckily I had a lot of help and support from especially my 2 directors, Father Alexandrios (Sir Fahry) and Sir Slipping through my Windows (Sir Darylle). 

The amount of support we received from them was very consistent throughout the heavy 3-4 months of practice sessions, including the lessons missed, the saturday sessions, the times we had to look for our own practice venue because every hall is occupied, and more that won’t fit into this paragraph. One very specific challenge I will always remember, is something I experienced with Sam (Kenzie) and Harry (Raja). We were 5 days away from the showing, and for the first time we tried doing our costume change which had to occur between act 1 and act 2. Now this was a 2-minute time slot, so you get the hassle of changing from the islander fit to the wedding fit. We communicated our struggles to the directors, and we asked permission to bring our outfits home not only to wash it, but also to practice the costume change. When we figured out it was possible in 2 minutes, our directors still extended the timeslot to 4 minutes due to their kindness. 

Well anyway, all the experiences that led to the final show was definitely worth it, as I personally believe that the performance delivered satisfied the expectations of the audience, the directors, and most importantly exceeded our own expectations. Some of us even shed tears as the musical came to an end, as along the journey not only did we discover new sides of ourselves, we made new friends and some close enough to be called family.

This of course is not only the hard work of the casts or ensembles, but also thanks to the support from the stage crew, backdrop crew, costume and makeup crew, tech crew, our dance instructor, and anyone else who contributed to the production that cannot be mentioned one by one. This is definitely one for the books for Bill. 

Once again, this has been the Mamma Mia Stella Maris Gading Serpong Secondary School production, and this is Bill Austin, signing out!!