Winter Musical Footloose Review

Linda Li

Ms. Guarino

IB HL Theater

6 March 2019

Winter Musical Footloose Review

People all need a little bit of wilderness and rebellion in their lives since we are all emotional and 

deeply passionate. Footloose showed me the themes such as the young's passion, love, happiness, 

sadness, surprise, authority, unity, friendship, courage, idealism, and their desires of freedom and 

rights. Also, the theme also include the importance of music in daily lives. TI really love the musical 

we ran this year and I am deeply touched by it. The tone of this play is overall humorous, interesting, 

light, happy, and hopeful. In this review, I am going to talk about my role, my experience, two of my 

favorite scenes, and my advises of development on this winter musical.

In the musical, I played a role called Cop. Like the name of the character, I am a police officer in 

Bomont. However, I am not really a good police since I constantly meet and deal with the drug dealer 

Chuck. I am also a representatives of the town's characteristics. First, the town of Bomont does not 

welcome outsiders and new people. Especially the adults in the town, their minds are really closed 

and conservative. For example, when Ren did not actually do anything wrong, I was just picking on 

him because I simply do not like outsiders and rebel teenagers. Like I yelled at Ren in the scene of 

"Somebody's eyes", I said "You are gonna have too learn that in Bomont. A stop sign means stop. 

And that radio music of yours is blasting pretty loud", and Ren replied angrily, "So you pulled me 

over because my music is too loud?" This clearly seems to me that it does not make sense when a 

police pulls over a person because his or her radio is too loud. I wanted to show my authority to Ren, 

thus I yelled at him, "Hey boy, watch your attitude!" For this specifically line, I decided to add some 

actions such as pulling his collard and pushing him away "violently" in order to highlight my 

authority and power in the show. From my understanding, musical is very heavily relied on 

characters' actions, voice, facial expression, body language, body poses, tone of speaking, music beat 

and pitch. Also my costume as a police office is really interesting. I wore police commissioner hat 

and a bullet prove jacket, black plants, white shirt, and black boots to express the characteristics and 

identity of my role too. This is my first time being a police in a show. I think this experience is really 

cool and interesting to me since I never got to act as a cool person. Acting as a police has gave me 

more experience of understanding and expressing the character's traits to the audience. The volume of 

speaking and the size of my movement both need to be really big to outline my authority and 

personality as a annoy police officer. 

That is enough about my character. It is time to talk about 2 of my favorite scenes in the show. First 

one of my favorite scenes is the one when Ariel and other girls are dancing in one of my favorite 

songs in the play, "I need a hero". I love the layers and lighting and colors of this scene. everyone was 

wearing different color of clothes, which forms a big contrast of color in the scene and definitely 

added more particles and layers. Also, the purple lighting of this scene ends up forming a beautiful 

color contrast with people's clothes. Especially the color of red and light green seem really obvious 

and vivid under the purple lighting. There were people siting, dancing, watching and doing different 

scenes. This has also definitely created more layers of the scene. And the styles everyone was 

dressing is really classic teenage and hip-pop style, which really matches the theme of the play. 

Especially Ariel's singing of "I need a hero" deeply impressed me, and the girls' dancing and gestures 

also gave me a sense of youth and passion and "girl's power". 

The second favorite scene of mine is when the adults are confronting the teenagers in 

two opposite triangular shape. The leader of the teenager "rebellions" is Ren, and he was on the tip of 

the triangle. The leader of the town's adults is the paster who was played Aaron, and he was on the tip 

of the triangle that was formed by the adults. Both Ren and Aaron are the main and influential 

characters is the show. The to opposite triangular shaped team laid "tip to tip" to each other also 

highlighted the seriousness and the severity of the conflict between the teenagers and the adults. 

Lastly, I would propose my advises on development of this musical. First, I think if would be better if 

we could have larger space for the characters to move around and interact with each other. However, 

due to the size limit of our black box theater, I knew this one is a difficult one to achieve. From my 

perspective, since this musical has a lot of people in it and most of the time almost all of the 

characters would need to be one stage at the same time, the scene seems a little bit of crowded for 

me. Secondly, I think everyone could improve their sing skills and practice more on using their 

voices. Sometimes I feel that many of the singers have suppressed their voice and could not reach the 

pitch. If we have more time to practice I think this could be easily improved overtime. Overall, this 

musical is awesome and I enjoyed it a lot.