News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Stone Memorial High School’s Theater Department is asking for the community’s support as they enter the final round of the Club Madness Challenge.
Theater Teacher and Director Eleni Fragopoulos said high school clubs and sports teams across the state participate by making minute-long videos detailing how they would use the $5,000 grand prize. Fragopoulos said she has a long list of things the theater department could do with the prize, starting with updating their lights.
“Above our auditorium, where the audience sits, there’s, there are lights hanging, but you cannot reach them in any way whatsoever,” Fragopoulos said. “There’s not a catwalk, and you have to get a special lift in. So it’s really not something that we can adjust or change colors to.”
Fragopoulos said each video is posted on ACTPrep.Com’s Facebook page and the winners are determined by who gets the most likes. Fragopoulos said the Stone Memorial video will be posted on the Facebook account at 11:00am on Thursday, May 16 and they will have 24 hours to get as many votes as they can.
She said support from the community is very important because new Facebook accounts cannot vote in the competition.
“They don’t want to have people just make accounts in order to get votes, so a lot of times the students who would like to vote, their vote won’t count because it hasn’t been around long enough, so we really need adults in the community to go to their Facebook page and like our video in order for us to get more votes this time,” Fragopoulos said. “And I know we’re going to need help because the people we’ve been going against have – they’re fierce competition.”
Fragopoulos said the theater program is self-funded, with ticket sales and concessions entirely paying for future shows.
“We build our sets,” Fragopoulos said. “We do our own lighting. We do our sound. The kids run the backstage, and so I train them to be stage managers. I train them to work in the booth, to take care of all of those things, and I’ve had many students go on in their college careers to use those skills, and some of them will actually be using those skills in their career path.”
