The Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School Minnesingers are taking more than a few extra steps to reward audiences at their spring concerts on May 12 and May 13.
“There’s a lot of dance in this show,” Minnesingers director Abigail Chandler told the Gazette Monday morning, during a quick break from gathering costumes for the Friday night and Saturday afternoon performances.
Movie lovers will recognize many of the dance sequences, which recreate classic moments from Grease, Dirty Dancing and other well-known films, said Ms. Chandler, who has titled the show The Time of Our Lives.
While most of the movie numbers rely on footwork, choreographer Ken Romero shifts the emphasis to the Minnesingers’ hands in the song At Last I See the Light, from Tangled.
Mr. Romero enlisted Islander Jill Taney to teach the choir American Sign Language, Ms. Chandler said, and they’ll sign the lyrics as they sing.
“It’s really, really lovely,” she said.
The dance segments will alternate with vocal sets accompanied by Minnesingers pianist Nancy Rogers, Ms. Chandler said.
“The choral stuff is unexpected — unusual, different,” she said. “We have one set of women composers in the classical choral world who have been pretty unrepresented, for centuries.”
Choral arrangements of 1960s rock tunes are on the program too, she said.
The chorus also will perform the set of songs that earned a silver medal at last month’s Massachusetts Instrumental and Choral Conductor’s Association Festival, in what Ms. Chandler said was the Minnesingers’ first appearance at the statewide festival since several years before the pandemic.
“We used to go fairly regularly, but it’s been a long time,” she said. “We finally went this spring and we won silver.”
The spring concert, for which the group has been rehearsing since December, is the Minnesingers’ primary fundraising event for their every-other-year tour, Ms. Chandler said. Next year the group is planning a concert tour of Austria, Bavaria and London.
“We’re really hoping to get our audience back. It’s been pretty lean the last few years because of Covid,” she said.
This weekend is also the Island community’s last chance to hear the voices of half a dozen talented seniors before they walk across the graduation stage and into their futures next month.
“We have some really great seniors,” Ms. Chandler said, adding that none of them has had the chance to perform before a full audience in the spring show.
“Jack Crawford has been with us since freshman year [and] he had one semester of normalcy,” Ms. Chandler said.
These will also be the final concerts for longtime Minnesingers Annabelle Brothers, Madeleine Bengtsson, Ava McGee and Genevieve Hyland, first-year chorus member Maya Tompkins and three-year costumer Isa Merriam, Ms. Chandler said.
Friday’s concert is set for 7 p.m. and Saturday’s for 4 p.m., both at the Martha’s Vineyard Performing Arts Center at the high school in Oak Bluffs.
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