MVHS Drama/Math Students Learn It First Hand

The drama students at Moapa Valley High School got some real hands-on learning last week. On Tuesday, February 10, 31 students and five adult chaperones traveled to the Las Vegas strip to see the Broadway hit, Phantom of the Opera at the Venetian. The group loaded into several School District vans at 4:30 p.m. to make it in to the 7:00 show.

After the show, the experience wasn’t over. Students were invited to stay behind for a question and answer session with members of the cast and stage crew. The group got back a little before midnight. “It was a long night, but

Seeing a live major theater production was an eye-opening experience for the students. “Most of the kids had never been to this show before,” Dalley said. “In fact, most had never seen any professional stage production at all.”

The play and the Q&A session which followed gave the students an opportunity to start making connections between the drama work they are doing at school and what happens at the professional level, Dalley explained. The MVHS Drama program is currently preparing for its Spring production: It Was A Dark And Starry Night. which will be held on March 31-April 2.

“In the conversations with the cast members, (the students) realized that the concepts that we are learning in class are not very far of a leap from the professional realm,” Dalley said.

Dalley joked that the cast members were able to validate in just a few minutes what she had been trying to teach her students for nearly six months.

The MVHS Tech crew also had a valuable interaction with the Production Stage Manager in the Phantom theater.

Two of the students who came along on the trip were not Drama students. Rather they were students with an interest in math and engineering.

What relevence would this have? Dalley said that these students were able to look closely at the special effects on the stage as difficult engineering problems.

Specifically, Dalley mentioned the famous falling chandelier in the theater. During the show, a huge chandelier above the audience is sent falling from the high ceiling towards the audience at a rate of 16 feet per second, stopping only 11 feet above the heads of the audience. This effect is regulated with precise timing by computers and technicians.

“This provides a lot for an engineering student to think about,” Dalley said. “It is the one thing that the stage techs will stop the show to make sure that it is right.”

Dalley said that many other pyrotechnic effects were of interest to the math students as well as the other stage tech students who attended.

The trip was paid for in full by the MVHS Empowerment funds. “If not for Empowerment, a trip like this would have been very difficult,” Dalley said. “The money would have had to come from our ticket sales or from fundraisers. And we would have had to scale back on our productions this year to spread the money out. We probably wouldn’t have been able to offer it to the students.”