Theater
The theatre troupe is known as The Saint Xavier Players, or simply the St. X Players. The Players sponsor four shows which include the fall straight show, eXpress (an improv troupe), a spring musical, and a student-faculty show.
Young women from nearby Catholic girls' schools also serve in the female roles and in the tech crew.
The St. X Players include a chapter of the International Thespian Society. However, there are also two special ranks specific to the St. X Players. Player Kings are those students who have dedicated a set amount of hours to drama, with a lower number of hours in specifically acting roles. The tech crew equivalent is the status of Rude Mechanical. An honorary Player Queen is chosen at the conclusion of every school year from among the young women who are seniors and have taken part in St. Xavier productions during the year.
In the 2005–2006 school year, the St. X Players put on A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare in October and Damn Yankees in March. In October of the 2006–2007 school year, the St. X Players performed The Tempest by William Shakespeare. The players performed "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" March 2008. Their production of "A Guy's Guide to School, Love, Immortality, and everything in between." ended in October 2008, . This production was written by St. X's creative writing class and the actors.In spring during the 2009 year, the Players performed the school version of Les Misérables. During the 2009-2010 school year, they performed The Hobbit and Andrew Lloyd Weber's Jesus Christ Superstar. Their shows "Oedipus" (Fall 2010) and "1776" (Spring 2011) were great hits. They performed "Arsenic and Old Lace" in the fall of 2011, and "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" in the spring of 2012. A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare is being performed this fall and "Godspell" in the spring.
eXpress, the improv troupe, performs for grade schools during the winter. This troupe consists of sophomores, juniors, and seniors from St. X, as well as juniors and seniors from nearby Catholic girls' schools.
"The Groundlings" is the newest edition to the Theater program at St. X, starting in 2005–2006. Unlike eXpress, "The Groundlings" consists only of St. Xavier freshmen. These freshmen take a crash course in improv acting and also perform a small skit in each eXpress performance.
The St. X Players also run a summer drama camp called Acting Up, introducing middle schoolers to theater and drama.
Read more about this topic: St. Xavier High School (Louisville)
Famous quotes containing the word theater:
“Will TV kill the theater? If the programs I have seen, save for “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” the ball games and the fights, are any criterion, the theater need not wake up in a cold sweat.”
—Tallulah Bankhead (1903–1968)
“The theater is a baffling business, and a shockingly wasteful one when you consider that people who have proven their worth, who have appeared in or been responsible for successful plays, who have given outstanding performances, can still, in the full tide of their energy, be forced, through lack of opportunity, to sit idle season after season, their enthusiasm, their morale, their very talent dwindling to slow gray death. Of finances we will not even speak; it is too sad a tale.”
—Ilka Chase (1905–1978)
“This ... is an age of specialization, and in such an age the repertory theater is an anachronism, a ludicrous anachronism.”
—Minnie Maddern Fiske (1865–1932)