Librarians, students in ‘Pitch Perfect’ spoof
Work by Bee Cave staffers, high schoolers will be seen before film at Alamo theater.
In what has become an annual tradition — and what some call the happiest day in the Bastrop County courts — Mina Elementary School second-graders visited Bastrop courtrooms Dec. 14 to sing Christmas carols. They first stopped at Court-atLaw Judge Benton Eskew’s courtroom, then followed that with a trip to District Judge Christopher Duggan’s court, where they gave the judge a toy, enjoyed candy canes and provided plenty of musical holiday cheer.
Big fans of the “Pitch Perfect” movies who are planning to see “Pitch Perfect 3,” premiering Thursday, might want to get to their seats a few minutes early at Alamo Drafthouse theaters to catch a glimpse of a local faces during the pre-show — a few Bee Cave librarians and three Lake Travis High School sophomores will be making their bigscreen debut.
What theatergoers will see on the screen — a team of Bee Cave Community librarians performing a dance to the tune of several “Pitch Perfect”-spoofed songs sung by three Lake Travis High School sophomore girls — is a production that took months to create, rehearse and fine-tune.
The collaboration was born in mid2016 when Lake Travis mom Rachel Morelli connected with Cate Sweeney, public services manager at the Bee Cave library, to see if they might provide an opportunity for a budding barbershop quartet of Lake Travis High sophomore girls to perform. The Belle Tones have been performing together since middle school and have won awards and were eager to bring their voices to more venues.
“We thought, ‘Maybe they can do this for fun and get some gigs,’ and that’s how we got connected with Cate,” said Morelli, who has a daughter in the quartet. “She said ‘I want to talk to you about this library project that’s going to be a “Pitch Perfect” spoof, and we’d love to have an a capella group sing it.’”
The project was a dance routine in a librarian book-cart drill team competition. For those scratching their heads about what that is, picture a gaggle of librarians on a stage in matching outfits, each pushing and spinning a book cart to music in a choreographed performance with literary themes. The Bee Cave library team of nine librarians competed against three other teams at the Texas Library Association conference in San Antonio in April.
“The library staff rehearsed January through March in the library, all on our own time when the library was closed,” Sweeney said. “It’s fun to do ... but really deep down, we do want to win.”
The librarians picked “Pitch Perfect” as their routine theme, and Sweeney and staffer Angela Rovetto wrote the lyrics to five spoofed cover songs.
That’s where the Belle Tones came in. Lead singer Emma Morelli, tenor Sophia Lynn and bass Abigail Storm spent hours recording the songs at the Musician’s Woodshed studios near Bee Cave. A fourth member was not available.
“It was more intense than we thought it was going to be,” Rachel Morelli said. “They were in the studio five, six hours total ... but when they saw the librarians perform, they thought that was really cool.”
The Bee Cave librarians didn’t win the book cart drill team competition. In fact, they placed fourth out of four teams. But Sweeney sent a video of the performance to Alamo Drafthouse, and three months later, they heard back — they’d be featured in the pre-show before “Pitch Perfect 3” at all Alamo Drafthouse locations.
The segment, which also features footage of the Belle Tones singing in the studio, will run 25 minutes before the movie starts. It will feature in the pre-show during the movie’s run.