Talented Trio Go Green for ‘Shrek the Musical’

Year 13 Newton Abbot College Performing Arts students Jake Herrera, Lois Harris and Imogen Thomas singlehandedly staged a performance of the hilarious ‘Shrek the Musical (……with 3)’ as part of their BTEC course examination.

The show, held in the College’s Daphne Collman Auditorium on 18 January, saw Shrek, Donkey, Princess Fiona and Lord Farquaad blast onto stage in an abridged version of the comedy musical. Playing to an audience of around 150, the talented trio delivered an impressive display of dramatic performance, comedy timing, vocal performances and choreography.

Preparations for the show (marking their last Performing Arts outing of their sixth form studies) started at the beginning of the academic year. Sixteen weeks of rehearsals saw students directing the piece, choreographing all the dance numbers, staging the event and devising their own costumes.

The resulting show, lasting over an hour, was met with a standing ovation; a real testament to the students’ talents on the stage.

Jake Herrera loved the performance: “This was a fitting end to an amazing two years of Performing Arts studies at Newton Abbot College; the audience really made the show come alive and to get a standing ovation was just brilliant. It has been fantastic working with these two other students who are my great friends; it really helps our chemistry on stage. We cannot thank the Performing Arts team enough for all their help to get us to this level; all three of us are looking into further education Performing Arts courses and the College has really given us an amazing platform from which we can achieve our goals.”

Teacher of Performing Arts and Dance, Sarah Wilkinson, couldn’t have been happier with the trio: “These three incredibly talented students worked extraordinarily hard to put on, what was essentially, an entire musical with only three people. They had such fun with it and delivered a genuinely hilarious performance; the comedy genre is hard to pull off, but they managed it with ease. All three of them will be sorely missed next year but we are very excited to hear about the next stage of their performance careers.”