By our count, there are 13 different performance spaces on campus. For a school of only 8,000, that’s a lot. We talked to seniors from the Pasquerilla East Musical Company (PEMCo), the Not-So-Royal Shakespeare (NSR) Company and the Film, Television and Theatre (FTT) department. They’re the people who’ve spent the last four years on these stages and who’ve worked day and night to put butts in those seats.
“There’s just so many opportunities to engage with theater on this campus for sure, which is really wonderful,” Bryce Bustamante said. “When we have our rehearsals and our shows going on, we still know friends who are in FTT shows, and we go out and support them. We have friends who are in NSR shows, and we go out and support them.”
Bustamante was a co-executive producer of PEMCo, Notre Dame’s student-run musical theater company, but he’s also a performer.
“I’ve done just about every PEMCo show,” he said.
“Young Frankenstein” was his first production with PEMCo.
“It was a very fun show, a very small show, which was really nice because we were able to get so close so quickly and got to know each other really well,” Bustamante said. “It was really wonderful, especially for that first semester on campus, to already start to have this community, to build those relationships with others and to know there is this space where you can all go and have fun and share in that together.”
Bustamante also recalls a Jell-O-related prop mishap from the show.
“There was a scene where Josh Vo had this brain, and it was supposed to drop and kind of splatter a little bit, and he would pick up the pieces,” he said. “The Jell-O mold was particularly loose that day, so it just went all over the stage. It was completely everywhere, and he’s a wonderful improviser, so he was down on his knees, trying to clean up with rags, singing ‘Hard Knock Life’ from ‘Annie.’”
Despite Vo’s best efforts, Bustamante slipped and fell — but that’s student-run theater.
Vo served as PEMCo’s artistic producer this year and directed their production of “Big Fish” last year, also working as an assistant director for FTT’s staging of “Eurydice.” According to Vo, directing can get all-consuming.
“When you’re directing, you’re there every day, all four hours, but then that’s just rehearsal time, and because of that, your show is everything that you’re thinking about all the time,” he said. “People are going to be asking you questions on the weekends, you’re meeting with costumes, you’re trying to think of lights for when you have those meetings, you’re trying to figure out what your schedule’s going to be for the next week, you’re blocking the stuff that you have to work next week. You’re also constantly asking yourself, ‘Is this going to be good?’”
Evelyn Berry has also done some of everything — from acting and graphic design for FTT to set design, lighting design, choreography and performing for PEMCo.
“When you’re on the production side of things, you’re more privy to how the whole machine works,” she noted.
She starred in “Big Fish” and remembers it fondly.
“The environment and the love that the cast had was so special and unique and uplifting, and we were all such a great support group for each other,” she said.
Jacob Rush was a producer for NSR, a campus theater group devoted to Shakespeare plays. Describing the behind-the-scenes work he did, he said, “It’s sort of like wrangling a bunch of monkeys in a mall.”
He estimated that 150 hours of labor went into this semester’s production of “King Lear” — which he worked on as assistant director alongside director Alyssa Miulli — and, as noted by Rush, it was ultimately worth the blood, sweat and tears.
“Music was a big part of that show. We wanted to make it feel like a 1940s movie, so we played musical scores behind half of the scenes to varying extents … When we realized all the beats and swells synced up almost perfectly, we realized this was going to be an amazing show, and it was,” Rush said. “There’s a recording of Alyssa and I moments after that scene finished in rehearsal, and we just look utterly shocked and joyful.”
Rush acted for NSR too. “Love’s Labors Lost” stood out to him as an outstanding production.
“I was Costard, the clown, and that was a really fun show. That’s still one of my favorites,” he said.
Miulli described NSR as “one big group of friends who love to do theater and support each other.” During rehearsals for “King Lear,” Miulli and her cast “would perform the fight choreography at 5% speed, which resulted in hilarious skits of slow motion action.”
“King Lear” was Miulli’s favorite show. She called it “one of NSR’s most ambitious productions to date.”
Miulli didn’t always direct, though. In fact, she comes from humble beginnings.
“My first show was NSR’s ‘The Winter’s Tale.’ I played Mamillius, the little boy prince that, spoiler alert, dies off-stage in act one,” she said.
Olivia Seymour was raised on Broadway cast recordings at home and was performing on stage from her youth.
“I did ‘Sunday in the Park with George’ when I was honestly too young to really get it, but growing up after that, and looking back at it, that was one of the most formative shows of my childhood,” she said.
Seymour worked as an actor, assistant stage manager and director, but on top of that, she wrote a musical (“Heart on Fire”) which was produced by FTT this spring and directed by professor Matt Hawkins, in whose “Musical Theatre Laboratory” course she started work on the show.
“Matt is somebody I’ve learned a lot from in my time here,” she said. “I ate, slept and breathed ‘Heart on Fire’ for two years, and it was the coolest thing ever to get all of my friends to do it and to see all of my words and my characters that had just lived in my head for so long come to life on stage.”
Kate Turner — also an FTT student — recalled working with professor Carys Kresny, saying, “She’s been a major mentor in my life since coming to Notre Dame, and she’s such a great acting professor and director.”
Turner performed in Kresny’s production of “Steel Magnolias,” which, Turner noted, brought together a tight-knit group of actresses.
“I feel like I live at DPAC … and I have no complaints,” she said about being an FTT major in the department’s DeBartolo Performing Arts Center. “I think it’s a unique major because if you’re majoring in it, and you’re also in the shows, it becomes your life — it is your life. You’re taking classes in the day, and you’re in rehearsal at night, so we just have a special community of people who are passionate about what we do.”
Turner thinks that there’s a growing appreciation for the arts at Notre Dame, one tied to its mission to be a force for good. Berry similarly posited, “Theater is being more recognized at Notre Dame.”
