Contemporary twists on classic tales

Green Bay East High School students will make theater history next week with their production of Parody This — a brand new show released in 2025.

East’s performances will be the first production of the show in Wisconsin and one of only eight productions of the show overall.

But doing a new show comes with challenges, including not being able to see other performances for inspiration.

“I’m most proud of the fact that we’re able to pull this off without seeing any previous directions of this,” student Joseph Kolze said. “There is no footage of this being produced somewhere else, so everything that we are doing is how we see it. We are taking all the creative liberties with this because the script can only tell you so much… It’s not like what we did last year with The Play That Goes Wrong where we could go watch other schools perform it and get ideas from that.”

“We don’t have anything to base our show off of except for what’s written in the script,” student Bridget Clarksen said. “In the beginning, there were a lot of blank spaces in our characters. The script can only tell us so much so we really had to fill in… We’re really proud of creating this really fun show.”

The show, as the name implies, features parodies of several literary works, adding in fun, current twists to bring new life to classic tales.

Parodies in the show include “Wickeds,” “Oedipus on Ice,” “Barbie’s Dreamhouse of Blood,” “Doctor Frankenstein Works at the Mall Now,” “Sherlock Holmes Hates You” and more.

“There’s really no storyline,” Kolze said. “There’s a little bit of a storyline going on with the narrators, but truly it is just a show where one scene pops up and another scene pops up and it just keeps bouncing back and forth and seems to have no correlation.”

“It doesn’t need any context,” Lola Daffner said. “It’s just a bunch of silly stuff that rests on things everyone else already knows.”

With so many different stories in the show, each student involved in the play has taken on multiple roles, sometimes with very little time to change between them.

“You have to dial every choice you make to 100, and those switches have to flip at the drop of a hat,” Daffner said. “You have to be able to go in and out of certain characters super quick and that makes it very fast-paced, but it also makes it more fun.”

“You’ve really got to take the time to get into your character, even if it is a matter of a minute or 30 seconds,” Clarksen said.

It’s those quick character changes and the students’ commitments to their characters, though, that makes this show special.

“We don’t have an elaborate set like we did last year. Because we have to change costumes so quickly, there’s not as much detail in there,” Daffner said. “But I think our cast does a very good job of making up for that with how they act and how they portray their characters, and I think that’s really cool… We all walk on stage each time carrying a different character and a different vibe and I think that’s something to really be proud of.”

And with so many stories featured in the show, both classic and contemporary, there’s sure to be something for all audience members to enjoy.

“The little details are what’s going to make this show funny,” student Jonhatan Ahumada Gallardo said. “There’s going to be stuff you already know, and since it’s a parody, we can do funny stuff with it and we can do whatever we want… There’s so many tiny details in reference to other plays and musicals, there’s got to be something for everyone in the show.”

Performances of Parody This will take place April 23 at 7 p.m., April 24 at 7 p.m. and April 25 at 1 p.m. and 7 p.m.