Why Should You Consider Doing a Musical Revue with your students?

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.