During the 2011 Warsaw Community High School Christmas Gala, more than 100 performing arts students will be singing, dancing, acting and playing musical instruments throughout the show. The Christmas Gala will take place in the high school’s Performing Arts Center Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Admission is $3 per person. There is no intermission for the approximate 75-minute show, which features band, choir, theater and dance students from the department. According to drama teacher Dana McAfee, her select theater class will perform three skits and one monologue. The skits are “Christmas Nerves”, “Going Up” and “The Water Cooler”. The monologue is titled “Christmas Lyrics Revisited”. “They’re all fun,” she said. Scott Avery said the choirs performing include the Festival (intermediate) Choir and the Select Chorale. Each group will perform songs independently, but will combine for some numbers. The groups will sing in variety of styles, including a cappella, with clarinets and African drums. “The nice thing about the gala is that one will flow into the next,” Avery said. “It’s very entertaining. The audience will get a nice variety and they all will be interspersed, a potpourri. The audience will get a nice sampling of what’s going on in the department.” The performers are the “cream of the crop”, Avery said, so it will include the older students sharing what they learned in school. Without an intermission, Avery said, “People will think it ends quickly when they see a lot.” The Performing Arts Center has been nicely decorated for the holiday, he said, so it’ll be a good environment for the holiday concert. “There are still people in the community who haven’t been in the PAC yet so it’ll be a great chance for them to experience it,” Avery said. Songs the choirs will sing include “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”, “What Child Is This”, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Baba Yetu”, a Swahili version of “The Lord’s Prayer”, featuring band director Mickey Ratliff on the African drums. For the band’s part, Ratliff said, the jazz band will perform a selection from “Charlie Brown’s Christmas Special” and a jazz version of “Hark the Herald Angel Sings”. The flute choir will perform “The Holly and the Ivy” and “The Carol of the Bells”. The saxophone ensemble will play a jazzy version of “Jingle Bells” based off of “Big Bad VooDoo Daddy”. Ratliff said the low brass ensemble will perform “Let It Snow”, while the percussion ensemble will do a Latin version of “Silent Night” titled “Silent Samba”.Courtney Brown, dance teacher, said all four of her dance classes will perform a swing number to a Michael Bublé Christmas song. They all have partners, and there will be about 85 kids on stage for the dance number. Brown’s classes have worked on the performance during the past nine weeks as time permitted. “For most of the students, this is their first dance experience,” Brown said. Students range from ninth to 12th grade. “It’s the first year for it, so we’re super excited for it,” Brown said. “The first performance ever.”
