Fright Night Recap
Photo Courtesy by Archbishop Moeller High School
As the spooky season comes to an end and the holiday season starts to sleigh through, let’s take a recap on one of the scariest plays of them all: “Fright Night”. This was the second play of the 2024-2025 school year the Moeller Theatre program performed with their newest director Mr. Girard. This play was perfect for the spooky season as it was performed the day before and on Halloween night. Along with the play performing on Halloween night, students were encouraged to wear Halloween costumes to make Halloween night more festive and spookier. As you read more, the Crusader interviewed Nathan Otten (Shown in the picture above), who was an actor in the play as a storyteller.
“Fright Night” had 3 spooky stories being told in the 1st Act. These stories weren’t acted out rather they were table-read stories meaning the actors read straight to the audience like a bedtime story. The first story was a poem by Edgar Allen Poe, the second story was about a guy stranded on a deserted island and had to commit cannibalism according to his diary, and finally the third story, which Nathan read to the audience was about a father who wants to get back at his wife because he was unhappy with their relationship. Now in the 2nd Act was the actual acting and the Moeller Theatre program acted out the “Halloween” movie. If you remember “Page to Stage”, the first play of the 2024-2025 school year, was like “Fright Night” with the aspect of table-read stories and not acting them out.
Although Nathan was in the play, Nathan thought the play was a bit too long with telling all the stories then acting out the “Halloween” movie. He said “everyone can agree that it was long, all the cast members and Mr. Girard mentioned it. I think it’s due to the fact that Mr. Girad is new and this being a new style. I think overall there is definitely improvement that could be done but I don’t think it was anybody’s fault. We haven’t done something like “Fright Night” before and there could be some kinks that can be ironed out if we continued to do “Fright Night”.” Although “Page to Stage” and “Fright Night” were alike with their style, “Page to Stage” was shorter because the stories were short whereas the stories from “Fright Night” were longer.
Photo Courtesy by Archbishop Moeller High School
However, with every project there are some goals and slip-ups that can build from the current project that can be made in the future. Nathan told us some of the goals and slip-ups that Mr. Girard and himself wanted to achieve during the making of this play. He said “he talked about goals and making characters but as time went on with getting certain sets, he explained to us about how he wants the story to play out and the reactions he wants the story to have on the audience.” To achieve this, some of the actors were assigned with a student director to help them talk about the way they should act for their specific part of the play. Nathan worked with Adam Holstein to talk about the goals that Mr. Girard set the standard towards with making sure the story was read thoroughly for the audience, building the characters in the story, and the reactions that would take place. Nathan said, “I just wanted to make it an enjoyable experience for the audience.” Now everyone isn’t perfect and always make mistakes, some of the mistakes that Mr. Girard wanted to work towards from the previous play was he wanted to add more character to the story instead of reading a story in a monotone style like we do in English class. He also wanted every word annunciated so that the audience could hear and follow the story and to look at the audience instead of reading off the paper.
Overall, this play went well not only for the casting crew but also for the audience. Although this play took about 2-3 hours with each act taking about an hour and a half, roughly 150-200 people came to witness this scary event. Teachers, families and students came up to the actors and complimented them with the work they put in to make the show a success.