Category: Arts & Culture

  Poly High’s Piano Recital took place during April 24, 25, and the 26. Students played pieces recognizable to all audiences like Dreaming of You. They also played classic romantic pieces such as Valse Romantique, performed by Megan Heng. The song was originally written in 1890 as a solo piece by French composer, Claude Debussy. Melissa Martinez played Renesmee’s Lullaby, which was originally written by Carter Burwell for the score of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn part II.

    Junior Anahi Vega played Mia and Sebastian’s Theme from “La La Land”. After playing the piano for nearly 3 years, Vega is able to pick up and memorize music quickly, “It took me about a month to memorize this piece. I still messed up, but it was okay.”

    Although memorizing sheet music is a skill Vega posses, but after all her performances, Vega still at times, lets her nerves get the better of her. “I actually hit the note I was messing up on, but I need to work on my stage fright. I look at the audience sometimes and just stop.”

This program in a way told a story, “It started kind of sad, then went to a weird place, but it ended on a happy note.”

    Junior, Maya Cheav, began playing piano 9 years ago when her mother brought home a old piano from work one day. She considers music as a pastime and not her career path. She doesn’t think much about the memorization of music, although she agrees it is key when learning the piano,  “ With sheet music, it depends on the song, anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.” Cheav recently started playing Jazz and now can tell the similarities between the two styles and embrace their differences. “I’m in Jazz as well so I know how to work with the whole team instead of just solo. Classical music is about sheet music, Jazz is more about expressing yourself, both are nice in different ways.”

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee came to Poly’s auditorium the weekend of February 9-11. This comedic musical follows a middle school spelling bee and the lives of the young competitors. There were two casts for a number of roles, and both were amazing and brought their own unique interpretation to the characters.

The spelling bee is run by Rona Lisa Peretti (Emma Waters and Marisa Imbroane), the third annual spelling bee winner, and Vice Principal Douglas Panch (Carlos Necochea) who provided hilarious example sentences for each contestant’s word. There to comfort the spellers and escort them off stage was Mitch Mahoney (Jeremy Padrones, Choir student teacher) who was serving his community service and delivered a soulful and astounding performance of “Prayer of the Comfort Counselor”.

Nico Fife and Max Noble played the role of Leaf Coneybear, a homeschooled boy who came in third in his spelling bee and only got to compete because the other two people could not. When he spells his words he is in a trance that somehow allows him to get the word right, in spite of showing no previous signs of exceptional intelligence which is shown in his song, “I’m Not That Smart”.

The Characer’s, Logianne Schwartzand Grubenierre (Adrianna Luna and Mika Dyo) was the youngest and most politically aware competitor with an adorable lisp who has two gay dads (Dane Camacho and Josiah Hon who provided a hilarious performance). She sings a song about her motivation for winning the bee in “Woe is Me.”

Chip Tolentino (Vincent Zamora) won the previous spelling bee and went to Nationals. He was eliminated early in this bee due to a hilariously unfortunate situation caused by Leaf’s sister Marigold. He goes on to deliver a song of lament chock full of comedy while selling concessions during the snack break called “My Unfortunate Distraction.”

Marcy Park (Gabriella Kaiser and Toni Bravo) is a typical overachiever who attends Catholic school. She gave an amazing performance full of dancing and incredible vocals called “I speak Six Languages” where she goes into detail about all of her abilities.

Olive Ostrovsky (Amanda Angeles and Mara Stanford) and William Barfee (Andy Martinez) were the final two spellers with Barfee taking the trophy. Olive has a mom who is in India (Marisa Imbroane and Jovanni Pham) and a workaholic father (Dane Camacho) and sings a heart tugging song called “The I Love You Song” which takes place in her head.

According to Linda Bon, Poly’s drama teacher, a Musical Theatre West scout came to the show and said Poly’s performing arts department is on par with the other performing art schools in the area.

One unique thing about this show is that audience volunteers have the opportunity to be picked as spellers in the show. One of the funniest volunteers was Albert Shaheen, a chemistry teacher at Poly.

All of the characters were easy to get attached to causing the audience to be sad when a speller was eliminated. Between the top notch acting, singing, dancing and nonstop comedy, Poly’s first musical was an overall success and they hope to have more in the following years.