After a week of performances and competitions, the top acts brought their shows to the Performing Arts Centre in Stettler on April 15.
The show saw the best acts in the various categories – speech, vocal, band, piano, musical theatre and dance – performed before a packed audience.
Awards were also presented to the performers who were recommended up to provincials. In Musical Theatre, Chloe Shingoose, Dacia Gramlick, Jaycee Davidson and Aaryn Lynham advanced. In Vocal, Aiden Kobi, Emma Webowesky, Dacia Gramlick, Thecla Wiart, The Gracenotes and the Rhapsody Girls and Tiny Tenors advanced. Miranda Peterson, Shayla Schultz and Jennifer Taylor advanced in piano, and Meg LaRose, Big Valley Grades 5 & 6, and Stettler Elementary Grade 2AH/2DB advanced in speech.
The performances at various points had the audience silent in rapt attention or outright laughing.
The Gracenotes, a vocal choir, opened the show with a performance of The Seal Lullaby, followed by Black Rode the Wind. The quiet, sad-sounding lullaby was offset by the jaunty sound of the second performance.
The sulky, pouty and foot-stamping performance of Taylor Roth, Emily Whipple and Kiersten Brittan, as their characters refused to say goodbye, had the packed house chuckling in laughter, but Dacia Gramlick’s strong, operatic voice silenced any remaining chuckles. Her voice, without the aid of a microphone, carried to the furthest levels of the audience without an issue.
In “I Really, Really Love You,” Jaycee Davidson, who received the highest mark in musical theatre, used her voice, facial expression and gestures to perform a one-person act of a stalker in love with her obsession. The performance started out sweetly, with Davidson at a table singing about love, but degenerated into a crazy, arm and leg flailing performance that showed the character’s dip into insanity.
The second half of the show opened with the amazing performance by Issac, Schubert, Rosanne and Roy Hernando. The four played the piano all at once, but throughout the performance of the song, individuals would get up and undertake certain tasks. At one point, only one person was left on the piano – throughout the song, members of the act rode a unicycle, dusted, juggled, applied makeup, poked and prodded their sibling, and more.
Gramlick again wowed the audience with a chilling musical theatre performance. As she paced the stage to a cradle, carrying a child, she sang about how the child looked like his father, who had left them. When the song completed, the audience was stunned into silence, as the beautiful song’s words made it clear the mother couldn’t love her child because of the resemblance to the father, and it had broken her heart.
Jennifer Taylor, who took highest mark in piano, impressed the audience with her performance of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in B flat major. As her hands danced over the keys, the audience listened in rapt silence.
Closing the show as they had opened it, the Gracenotes once again took stage. Unlike the choral opening, the musical theatre act that closed out the show was a humorous performance of “Trashin’ the Camp.”
More than 700 entrants competed in the ten-day festival, which has grown from its original three-day format when it started in 1969. More than 100 volunteers annually contribute their time to make the festival flow as seamlessly as possible, and more than $10,000 are given out in scholarships.
See more photos in this week's paper.