Burnaby students put on a huge Broadway show

Lights, action, music, dance and song; it’s all in the musical Burnaby South Secondary students created with their teachers. The SpongeBob Musical will open at the Michael J. Fox Theatre in Burnaby this Thursday, Mar. 6 at 7pm and the students are promising to put on a spectacular performance for the community. The play is based on SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical and tickets cost $15 for adults and $10 for students.

The musical follows some of the SpongeBob SquarePants animated series characters as they navigate challenges together as a community. The musical production is one of the largest undertaken by Burnaby South Secondary students and teachers, who are working both onstage and backstage on the production. The musical also features a full orchestra of Burnaby South students. 

“We have 150 Burnaby South students involved. We have 50 performers, and we have a full orchestra doing the music in the pit. And our biggest component is actually our stagecraft program, or our production program, which has 90 kids connected to it,” said Emily Dewar, show director and head of the Visual and Performing Arts Department at Burnaby South. 

The production is a big moment for Dewar, who started the drama program six years ago and has been growing it ever since with increasingly ambitious productions. 

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“When I started six years ago, there was no production program here. I just had one student who was really passionate about it, and we started the program up. Initially, we had enough to run a course, but then it got bigger. Then I combined forces with our dance teacher, who also ran a dance production program,” Dewar told the Beacon. “I just wanted to create something that I really wanted to do. I had the support of my department, with the band teacher, Ms. Carly, the vocals teacher, Mr. Wong, and the choreographer, and my partner in crime for production, Ms. Wilson. Because I knew I had the support in the leadership end of things, I felt pretty confident that this musical would be a success.”

Dewar said the show will include a wide variety of spectacles and performances. There is a blacklight number where the students dance in the dark, and only a few sections are visible under the blacklight. There will be some tap dancing, hip hop dancing, and songs written by famous artists such as David Bowie, Cyndi Lauper, and John Legend. 

Over the years, Dewar said the program has been saving the income from previous performances to fund future projects. Part of the funding for the SpongeBob Musical came from those savings, in addition to $2,000 donated by the Platinum Pro-Claim restoration company. In addition, the school does not pay to rent the theatre. The total budget for the production was around $10,000.  

“It’s just a massive effort on everyone’s part. Everyone has an equal amount to contribute. We have wonderful staff members and students who are all very cooperative and very willing to just work with each other and build a community around this show. So it’s difficult at times, I can’t lie, but you know, it comes together at the end,” said Aya Godwin, the stage manager for the performance and a Grade 12 student at Burnaby South. 

The students who are participating in the production come from all grades at Burnaby South Secondary, from Grades 8 to 12. Dewar said the student participants are just as passionate about the musical as she is; they all want to be part of it and are devoting a great deal of time and effort. 

“​​When I first found out, I was definitely a little nauseous because this is a huge show, and everyone has to put in the same amount of effort,” said Zara Thomas, the lead who is playing the role of SpongeBob and a Grade 12 student at Burnaby South. “When you’re doing something at such a big scale with such a huge theatre with so many participants, there’s no way to not do it correctly with all your passion. So I think I was a little bit nervous in that sense. But so far, this has been probably one of the most fun productions I’ve ever done.”

Thomas added that there are many comedic elements to the show that added to the fun of working on it. The story has an underlying environmental theme, reflected in the students and teachers working hard to repurpose and recycle materials for the show. 

According to Godwin, the sets team used recycled trash to create the sets, including old schoolwork, books, and plastic bottles. 

“One of the biggest examples of this is our coral, that two of our lovely Grade 12 students—new students to production—made this year out of Ms. Stewart’s broken bar stools,” Godwin said. 

The students had an even deeper environmental message to send through their use of recycled materials. 

“We used all these recycled trash materials to really emphasize our environmental impact and the awareness and the fact that our oceans are not clean, that all these things may actually be on pieces of coral, on reefs, on all these different things,” said Thomas.

This piece was made possible by the Local Journalism Initiative.

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