Junior Camila Patino, the only person who progressed to nationals last fall, approached this year’s festival with the expectation that she would move on again. 

“I just had to work more on it this year because nationals was such an amazing experience, and I want to experience that as many times as I can,” Patino said. 

In order to attend this theater festival, each person had to participate in an Independent Event, a competition in which students could showcase their talent. Because Patino progressed to nationals with a monologue last year, she was given the opportunity to compete with another monologue again.  

The morning of the competition, Patino had a routine to prepare for her IE. Before going in for her competition, she felt ready and confident  but still nervous. 

“I still get so nervous when I go up and act, but I feel like knowing how to use that in your monologue or scene is so special because it kind of takes away from the nervousness because once you’re already doing what you love, everything else doesn’t matter,” Patino said.

After her event, Patino said that she felt that she “did fine,” not her best but “it wasn’t catastrophic.”

However, that feeling changed when Patino was called back for a chance to perform at closing ceremonies in front of everyone who had attended the festival. This meant that the judges had given Patino a perfect score on all aspects of her audition. 

“I kind of just had to go in with the most confidence because when they’re looking at callbacks, they’re looking at which monologue is the most entertaining for the crowd,” Patino said.

Although she didn’t end up getting accepted to perform at closing ceremonies, Patino did advance to nationals and when attending the workshops, her goals for this year were much different than last. 

“Last year, I was just going to the workshops for fun, and this year I was going to the workshops more to better my projects in RBP,” Patino said. “Like, I went to a directing workshop for Brown Bags (student directed plays).”

Along with Patino, junior and technician Reece Langland also received a mainstage callback for his stage management IE and was a part of a video that was showcased at closing ceremonies. 

“They only sent callbacks to the technicians who got perfect scores on their [events], but I didn’t know at the time that that meant I got a perfect score,” Langland said.

Langland’s Thespian accomplishments did not start or end at the festival though.

“I was a part of the All-State Cast and Crew Closing Ceremony,” Langland said. “We basically auditioned about two months ago, then about a month after that, I got an email saying I got accepted [as one of four stage managers]. We were doing a mini musical and we rehearsed on Zoom. That was a little bit of a challenge because we didn’t get to be in one central location.” 

Stage managing a mini-musical to put on in front of over 10,000 people at closing ceremonies required weekly virtual rehearsals in the weeks leading up to the festival. Then, at the festival, Langland would attend rehearsal from 7-10 p.m. every day after workshops.

Despite the late nights and the hard work, it was worth it to Langland. 

“We made a lot of friends, and now we have friends from all over Texas,” Langland said. “It was a good time.” 

Because of his perfect score with his stage management IE, Langland was one of the 15 Bellaire students, and the only technician, to move on to nationals. 

While both Patino and Langland said their IE’s went fine, senior Ava Tumey, who competed in the solo musical category, did not feel as positive about hers. 

“I thought I did horrible,” Tumey said. “I forgot some words. I hummed with it. I had no confidence when I got off.” 

The song Tumey picked, “I Cain’t Say No” from the musical “Oklahoma!”, was one that she had already learned. 

“I was just disappointed in myself because I’ve done this song before so I knew I could do well,” Tumey said. 

Tumey did not feel this way before she went up on stage though. 

“I think the more people who went in front of me, my confidence grew because I was like ‘These people are also making mistakes,’” Tumey said. “Everyone in the room who’s also competing is in the room with you, watching you, and the judges are all smiling at you.”

After the competition, Tumey did not want to think about her performance, and when national qualifiers came out the next day, she did not even want to look at the results.

“When we were getting the messages [to find out who qualified], I was like, ‘Okay, nobody tell me who got in’ because I needed the moment to decompress and be like, ‘Yeah, I didn’t get it,’” Tumey said. 

However, when Tumey finally looked at the list, her name was there. 

“I had to have my friend pinch me and then have somebody else also saying that my name was on the list,” Tumey said. 

After accepting that she had moved on, Tumey made a plan for how she was going to succeed further at nationals. 

“I’m just going to keep doing what I’ve been doing, work harder and I’m going to do more character analysis and read the musical again,” Tumey said. 

While she was competing at Texas Thespians, Tumey also had to complete her college prescreens, video recordings of audition pieces that are submitted virtually. 

“College prescreens and auditions are one of the most stressful experiences I’ve ever gone through because every college has something different, wants different angles, different things, different songs, different monologues,” Tumey said.

Tumey was even thinking of just focusing on one thing to take things off her plate. 

“I was honestly thinking about dropping Thespians just because [college auditions] were so stressful,” Tumey said.

However, Tumey decided to go in the end, accomplishing her goals of progressing to nationals.

Another senior, Joshua Percy, had a lot on his plate as well, although it wasn’t college auditions. 

Part of the only group scene competing from Bellaire at Texas Thespians, Percy was delegated the role of director of his group.  

“It felt like I was left to do everything,” Percy said. 

Percy had to make the cuts for his script, do the blocking and make sure his group stayed organized and on task. 

“It was pretty overwhelming leading up to [the festival] because all I was focused on was competition,” Percy said. 

Going into the IE, Percy thought it was “very strange” because they had to walk outside in the rain to a separate hotel for the competition. 

“It’s raining,” Percy said. “It’s cold. So we’re now all worried about getting water or getting rain on our nice clothes. Then we go into this packed hallway with a lot of other schools. And then they’re finally like, ‘Okay, group acting come in.’”

Despite having to direct the whole scene himself, Percy did feel that their group was one of the better ones from what they saw, even though they left halfway through the competition after performing. 

After leaving, Percy didn’t know how to feel. His main focus was reassuring his team. 

“I feel like I almost never had the time to not be okay because I was so focused on making sure [my team] was, and after the fact I was just reassuring them,” Percy said. 

Unfortunately, although they had given it their best shot, Percy and his group did not move on to nationals this year. 

“I was actually just kind of in denial for a little while and I was thinking maybe they just haven’t announced everything yet, or maybe we just missed it or something like that,” Percy said. 

Percy said that part of this was because he had been appointed the director of the group.

“I don’t know that I would have taken it as hard if someone else were the leader,” Percy said. 

Allison Underhill, the technical theater director, and Nathanial Unroe, one of the production theater directors, chaperoned the group of students to the Texas Thespian Festival.

“I have never taken this many [students] before,” Underhill said. “That was an extra addition of paperwork that I needed to fill out, and there were lots of boxes that I needed to check off and make sure we were taking care of before leaving. I was really thankful I had a good organization system.”

While Underhill worked with the junior varsity and varsity tech students, Unroe was in charge of preparing the junior varsity production students for the competition. 

One of the duet scenes that he worked on was sophomore Camila Chandler’s. 

“I went into the practice process wanting all the help possible, especially because it was my first year competing at Thespians,” Chandler said. 

According to Unroe, Chandler and her partner sophomore Aiden Gross were very determined to get the scene right. 

“They would not stop trying to get my attention to come help them work…just pushing and pushing and pushing to the point where it’s like, ‘Okay, we might actually be adding too much. Your scene might be perfect,’” Unroe said. 

Chandler’s scene was from “Little Women” by Kate Hamill, where she played the character of Jo. 

“Just making [the scene] look natural is the hardest thing to do in acting because when you get these lines, especially from something like “Little Women”, it’s weird language and you have to make it sound like you’re meeting this person for the first time [in a] casual interaction and [without it] look[ing] animated in a real weird way,” Chandler said.

This wasn’t the only struggle with this process. While both Chandler and Gross had the goal of making the scene look good, they didn’t always see the same path to getting there. 

“Aiden was very sensitive about me reading the book and watching the movie and doing all this research, and I just wanted to do character building in a different way,” Chandler said. “Everyone has their own techniques.”

However, after they started working together, the way they approached the scene changed.

“When I listened to Aiden and he listened to me, we got good feedback from each other,” Chandler said. “When we finally started working as a team, it changed the game.”

Chandler said that her scene had improved a lot from the beginning of the process to her competition, especially since she had gone from feeling very excited to feeling nervous as she got closer to the date.

“I was most proud of the fact that I was so scared and shaky, but I was [still] able to give it my best,” Chandler said. 

Chandler was also one of the 15 to advance to nationals. 

“Right now we’re taking a break because you don’t want to ruin the scene,” Chandler said.

Chandler has a very specific goal for nationals though, after she starts to rehearse again in April or May. 

“I want to be less nervous, and that’s a hard demand, but I think if I can just take a deep breath and do what I know how to do, then I will be 100 times better,” Chandler said.