West Side Story Tryouts

Alondra Rico|October 9, 2019

West Side Story is a modern Romeo and Juliet, it takes place in New York in the 60’s. Some major topics in the play are immigration, racism, and hating people you don’t know for no reason. This is the first play where three of our districts schools students can audition, this includes, Righetti High School, Santa Maria High School, and Pioneer Valley High School. Participating in plays like this really bring out the joy of others. Also tells us a deep story while being entertained. All these amazing people with so much talent, are putting lots of effort and passion not only in this play, but all of them. Hope you all come out and watch the West Side Story play!

Our students from Pioneer Valley show off their amazing talents!

“The auditions were so fun,” the most challenging part of auditions for Odessa was certain aspects of the dance. “Usually in dance you are taught to pirouette [complex turn] and land back, so it was hard to go straight into the next move [without landing back].” -Odessa Laurie (11)
“The dancing for me, was the most difficult because your trying to catch up and you only have like 20-30 min to get the dance down and memorized. The teacher was also going really fast, so it was difficult to learn all the steps quickly but then once you start getting all the pieces together, than it starts to get a little easier, but overall the dancing was the most difficult for me. The singing wasn’t to hard for me, since I grew up around a singing family, so it not that hard for me to sing and since I’m also in Jazz Choir. All my friends help me out a lot to get into drama and with the dances as well. “-Eli Chavez(9)
“I’m their spotter, so I teach the students the choreography, so when Ms. Barrette needs to step back and watch the students, me and another student, Noe, dance with them so they don’t get lost and that just helps them learn the dance faster. This way, Ms. Barrette can see who learns the dances faster.”-Ixtla Vazquez Rosales
“On Monday after Santa Maria kids we only had 25. Today we will have double that. We are trying to find leads from all the different schools. West Side Story is the modern day Romeo and Juliet setting in New York 1960’s it includes immigration, racism, hating on others.”-Ms. Vangronigen
Overall from the three schools there were over 100 students audition for the play, “It’s been really fun because we’ve had a lot of new people that we haven’t seen before and I think were going to have like an exemplary cast of people because we’ve had some amazing talent come out. Were all just very excited, its something that we’ve never done before, having all three schools at one site for a big production. were really looking forward to all the new faces, all the new talent. Also getting the community involved because this is really like a labor of love for the entire community of Santa Maria and we hope that the story resonates with the audience that we pull in and we want to encourage our students to come because the whole story is based off the story of Romeo and Juliet and that is something that gets covered in freshmen English, so having those students get to see a Romeo and Juliet on stage, takes your earning to another level.”- Ms. Barrette