Stevens Dramatic Society prepares You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown

In their performance of the musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, the Stevens Dramatic Society (SDS) will be presenting a more cinematic version of the source material. The musical will be live streamed on December 4 at 7:45 p.m. and December 5 at 1:45 p.m. for free at this link.

In order to better suit a virtual environment, the musical was altered to include more scenes recorded as though on a Zoom call. According to the production team, “Originally this production would have happened in-person on the DeBaun stage in EAS, but with the pandemic, we had to reinvent our ideas on how student produced theater could be created.”

The production team was comprised of a variety of people, including Derek van Rouendal as Charlie Brown and Director, Carissa Greene as Lucy Van Pelt and Video Editor, and Cameron Clifford as Producer, Choreographer, and Woodstock. The full playbill can be seen here.

The team also stressed safety as being very important, stating, “We knew if we were gonna pull it off we had to do it safely. Anything we filmed together, we filmed outside and wore masks, and we kept that to only a few numbers.”

The musical was recorded partially in-person and partially online. Many scenes were filmed in the homes of the actors, which allowed them to get the “online call” scenes.

Despite not being an onstage performance, the musical still required the work of a lot of people, both as actors and “backstage.” According to the team, “We had some great behind-the-scenes work of our Accompanist recording tracks of all the songs, actors recording their audio and video individually at home, an Audio Engineer mixing and finalizing the music, and Video Editors applying finishing touches on the film.”

The production process also included filming musical numbers and group scenes where actors “[took] to the streets of Hoboken with a phone, a gimbal, a microphone, and our handy clapperboard … It was great to get together (while still social distancing) after being away from campus for so long, and we enjoyed the range of looks we got from fellow Hobokenites, from thumbs-up of support to confused looks and points as we walked around the city in our costumes and equipment.”

SDS welcomes everyone to watch the live stream, expressing, “We’d like to thank everyone involved for their dedication and support in this virtual semester. The spirit of theater lives on in this production, with lots of dancing, singing, classic Charlie Brown humor, and joy.”