Photo courtesy of Hofstra Drama
After a successful fall semester with two in-person performances and a film release, the Hofstra Drama Department geared up for the spring semester. With the rise in COVID-19 cases, however, the department decided to perform their spring productions virtually. Like the first show of the semester, “Barbecue,” the drama department’s production of the musical “Working” was livestreamed and made available for free. The show ran on weekends from Friday, March 19, to Sunday, March 28 and was performed on Zoom with the performance available to watch via ShowTix4U.
“Working,” written by Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso, is based on the Studs Terkel book “Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do,” and follows the lives of ordinary people as they go about their day jobs. The show is a poignant look at what it means to be fortunate enough to work, but also the many reasons why people do the work they do.
Directed by Dr. Cindy Rosenthal of the drama department, “Working” featured a cast of 13 students. Seniors Chris Ho, Natalia Cotto, Kyra Janaé Bryant and David York led the cast in an array of vignettes, with Bryant making her mainstage debut. Juniors Avery Rudd, Ben Cohn, Tess Le Coney and Olivia Keena-Ross dazzled the audience with powerful renditions of their numbers, “Working” was Cohn’s mainstage debut as well. Le Coney and Keena-Ross presented powerful performances with “It’s An Art” and “Nobody Tells Me How,” respectively. Ho got the audience up on their feet and dancing with his number “Delivery,” and he and Cotto sat them down in tears with “Delivery” and Cotto’s number “Just a Housewife.”
The rest of the cast was filled out with a number of extremely talented underclassmen, who proved that there’s a bright future ahead for the drama department. Sophomore Aiden Holubeck along with freshmen Spencer Giles, Christian Harris, Allison Paul and Weston Scheck rounded out the show with their own slew of amazing debut performances. Giles and Scheck kept the waterworks coming with their respective renditions of “Fathers and Sons” and “The Mason Song.” Paul demanded applause with her gripping performance of “Cleanin’ Women.” Every cast member pulled double duty for this show, playing two different characters with two different jobs. Each actor beautifully handled this challenge and delivered two weekends of stellar work. The time and effort they put into this show was apparent and it certainly paid off.
Compared to previous productions, “Working” was a one-of-a-kind show for Hofstra, as it was presented using a mix of pre-recorded content and live Zoom performances. The songs for the show were pre-recorded in Hofstra’s Black Box Theater, while scenes and monologues were performed in real-time. While this definitely wasn’t an ideal set up, the cast took advantage of this unique opportunity to make the best of it. “I really am glad that I was in the cast that I was in, because it didn’t feel as much like I was performing alone,” Scheck said. “We were all in our Zoom call together and we had our cameras on the entire time, and during songs and stuff we’d all have little dance parties. The worst part was always clicking leave on the Zoom and now you’re sitting alone in your room.”
“Working” was a smash hit success overall, as the cast delivered two weekends of stellar performances. If you missed this show, have no fear. The department’s last show for the spring semester, “Phaedra,” will be performing weekends from April 9-18, and is sure to be an excellent end to the semester.
