The work behind this year’s Broadway Cabaret

By Alana MacKay-Kao

ARTS EDITOR

Andover Vocal Music Association’s annual Broadway Cabaret took place virtually last month, due in no small part to the tireless efforts of several student and teacher volunteers including junior Juliana Kaufman, senior Gio Coppola, and teachers Chris Desjardins (Mr. D), Daniel Brennan, and Beth Kennedy. 

The Cabaret consisted of performances by all of the Show Choir groups, smaller groups, and soloists. Each performer had to submit videos of themselves performing their numbers. Emcees also had to record themselves and send in their videos. Having the most members, the Show Choir pieces took the most coordination and work.

Mr. D was in charge of mixing the audio to make it sound like the groups were actually singing simultaneously. “I use a program called Logic to put all the voices together. Normally the way I do it is I actually group all the recordings by voice part,” he explained. “Then I mix down all the voice parts and then I put the voice parts together with the pre-recorded music and try to line everything up, but it is tedious at best.”

Coppola was responsible for pulling the final Cabaret video together and making it presentable for that Friday night. He also put together the video of “Unruly Heart,” one of the group numbers, being performed.

While it isn’t a craft he usually spends much time on, Coppola enjoys filmmaking and editing. He has been editing videos since middle school when he created videos for YouTube. 

“I started on Windows Movie Maker and I just kind of started playing around with different things,” he explained, describing how he got started. “It was a lot of getting practice with it.” Coppola has also made a promotional video for Show Choir and works at AYS, where he is the instructor for the Movie Makers program.

If you’re looking to learn video editing, he recommended YouTube tutorials. “YouTube honestly is like the best place if you want to learn how to do almost anything. It’s definitely really helpful because these editing softwares can be ridiculously complicated and not fun to look at.” If he was looking for a specific effect, he said, “I knew what I wanted it to do, but I didn’t know how to do it. You just look it up on YouTube and there are 8,000 people who’ve done it who will show you.” 

Finally, once all of the individual numbers were edited, the video and audio clips for each number and emcee could be put together to become the ultimate video that encompassed the entire Cabaret. This wasn’t the end though. Coppola downloaded all of the videos and put them into Final Cut in the running order and inserted the intros done by the emcees. 

That was when he realized that his laptop wasn’t powerful enough to process the video. The night before Cabaret, Coppola and Mr. D discussed this on a Google Meet. They had to come up with a solution fast. Mr. D remembered that Juliana Kaufman, a junior at AHS who also did some of the video editing, had borrowed an iMac from the school. They called Kaufman to ask if they could borrow the iMac so that Coppola could finish the video, and Mr. D drove it from one side of Andover to the other at 10 p.m. It was this dedication from the team that allowed the Cabaret to happen.

Here’s the way Mr. D described it: “We’re all kind of trying to put the ship together while in the middle of the ocean, if you will.” The final video was finished at 4 a.m. on the Friday it premiered, just in the nick of time. Coppola alone spent 26 hours working on the Cabaret.

“Everyone’s been affected by this,” Coppola said in regards to the pandemic, “[but] sports games still get to happen. You get to do your meets and your games…. We don’t have that right now. We can’t perform. Chorus, band, orchestra, Drama Guild, Show Choir, we’re kind of at a standstill and are very much relying on doing these virtual things because it’s quite literally our only outlet right now to do any of it. So next time we do something, maybe go hop on.”