For Madrigal Feaste, the show goes on

Virtual production will feature script tailored to bizarre year

New Britain High School’s 42-year streak of running an annual Madrigal Feaste will go on, even though the audience andperformers will all be at home.

Dozens of students recorded segments of “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad-rigal Feaste” that are being edited together for online streaming Friday night.

Keeping the audience and performers safe during the pandemic was a challenge, producers acknowledged, but the key goal this year was to put on a show regardless.

“With the amount of my life that has gone into the Madrigal Feaste, there was no way I was going to let the tradition die this year,” said Jason Nicolo Ferrandino, the director of the school’s Madrigal Singers for the past three years and previously assistant director for 18.

In ordinary years the performance is 15th century-themed dinner theater for live audiences, but that simply wasn’t workable in 2020 — not only are large live audiences prohibited, but health precautions preclude assembling large choirs in person for singing.

“When I think back to last March when we weren’t able to do our musical, that was devastating. This shows how our students and staff have grown to learn howto prepare and perform virtually,” Superintendent of Schools Nancy Sarra said Wednesday.

“I credit the music department at the high school for their resiliency — the performance must go on,” Sarra said.

Ferrandino and his colleagues at the high school created a production that students could assemble piece by piece. They’ve been recording their individual performances, and this weekFerrandinoandothermusicdepartment faculty have been editing and assembling scores of segments into an 80-minute show.

“I knew that anything we did had to be done virtually andI also knewthat wewould not be able to utilize our signature Elizabethan costumes for this year,” Ferrandino said. “So, in order to get around this I set the script in a 1940s radio station that is putting on a play about Queen Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots.”

The story is a takeoff on the 1963 comedy “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” and has references to David Lynch’s TVseries “Twin Peaks.”

“Lynch’s bizarre outlook and unsettling style were exactly what I thought we could use to mirror the unsettled and bizarre state of affairs that we are all coping with in the world today,” Ferrandino said.

Students Sara Colapietro and Candace Farley star as two rival actresses who are at the radio station portraying Elizabeth I and

Mary, Queen of Scots in an on-air play. A mysterious disease breaks out and the two women are quarantined in the studio for the night with the station manager, the director, an announcer and the star of a competing show.

To keep alive the dinner part of the dinner theater, the school’s culinary department is producing takeout meals for audience members who’ve already ordered them.

The show will be streamed Friday at 7 p.m.; tickets are $15 for the link to the private streaming site. They can be ordered before Friday evening through feaste@csdnb.org.

Sarra said there’s anadvantage to the digital version of the show.

“I’ll be in my virtual front row — and this year my family from out of state can enjoy it, too, so that’s oneof the pluses,” she said. “This is also allowing some of the alumni to see it.”