This year in theater at LJCDS will be full of new things. The Upper School musical and play will both be more well known titles, which doesn’t happen often. There are also many new additions to the Four Flowers theater, such as new chairs and lighting. Technical theater director Mr. Peveich thinks that this year is “going to be a really strong year of theater.” The Upper School kicked off with The Complete Works of William Shakespeare this September as the Fall play. The Spring play will be Macbeth, and according to US and MS performing arts educator Dr. Short, the musical will be “a new musical that takes place in the underworld and relates one of maybe the most popular myths of all time.” As for the Middle School, the play will be How to Survive Being in a Shakespeare Play, and the musical is You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.

     Every few years LJCDS puts on Shakespeare shows, and this is one of those years.“The last Shakespeare show that we did was A Midsummer Night’s Dream and that was very, I guess the like actual theme for it was Gen Z fever dream. And that is not the approach we’re taking this time. We’re doing a very serious period piece with this, which I’m very excited about,” says senior Eli Vukotich. Eli is looking forward to Macbeth as it “gives our designers and our actors a chance to stretch   themselves.” For both the US plays, some advanced tech is going to be used. There will be a stage elevator that will be used to bring people up and lower them down into the set. Each show will have a different feel as well. Mr. Peveich says that “We have so many really cool opportunities, we’re working with different materials. We’re working with different structures, different sorts of ways of designing the shows. And I’ve just seen some preliminary sketches from our design team at this point, but the stuff that they are coming up with is different and a lot of ways than stuff that we’ve seen in the past and they just sort of continue to sort of push the envelope about what our shows look like and feel like.” What is also going to make these shows stand out will be the new renovations to the Four Flowers. All the seats have been redone and to be more comfortable and to be less  “loud and broken and noisy and annoying and stupid and uncomfortable and smelly and dumb and old and broken and gross and ugly and unsafe.”, as Dr. Short put it. Nearly all of the lighting fixtures in the theater are now LED, and all of the seating is fully ADA compliant. “This year specifically has the biggest upgrade, probably the biggest visual upgrade for anyone who’s walked into the theater, been in the theater, you know, in 20 years.” Mr. Peveich says. With these new upgrades to the theater and the diversity of the programs, this year in theater promises to be a good one.