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In May, the Drama Club held their annual end of year banquet, and the play and musical productions of the 2025-2026 school year were announced. Drumroll please…next year OSHS will be performing Little Women as the fall play and Chicago as the musical!
To begin with the play, Little Women is a coming-of-age story that was originally written by Louisa May Alcott. This novel follows four sisters and their struggles to conform to society’s ideals of women in the time period of the 1860s. Nicole Willis, the director of OSHS Drama Club, details her final choice of Little Women as the next play, saying, “we had four options for the play including Radium Girls and Little Women which were the ones that it came down to. And then we went with Little Women because that was what most people [of the drama club] voted for.” Willis adds that this play is, “kind of close to my heart because this was actually my senior project”. As her high school capstone back when Willis was a student at OSHS, Willis helped to direct, “Little Women at the middle school because they don’t do plays.” Normally the middle school performs a musical every year, but Willis changed this for her capstone, and middle school students got to do a play instead.
For the musical, Willis along with Dr. Jeremy Milton, the music director for OSHS Drama, picked Chicago for a few reasons. Willis details the process of coming to this decision, saying, “The general vibe was that kids didn’t want to do shows about high school or children…they wanted to do a more adult sort of show.” This was a prime factor that led to the choice of Chicago. Chicago is a more mature musical, following two women who are incarcerated in jail for murder. It is set in the 1920s era and specifically highlights the celebrity culture of this era. To Willis, Chicago is, “a really cool style [of musical], it’s jazz, which is very different from what you normally see.” This uniqueness as well as its popularity among the members of the Drama Club led to the decision of Chicago as its next musical.
These two shows have members of the OSHS cast excited for next year. Mikalya Pace, an avid member of the OSHS Drama Club and its shows, said, “I’m very excited. I think Willis and Milton both chose some amazing shows for our cast, and I think everyone’s going to have a lot of fun.”