Freeport Area High School’s film and theater programs earned their upcoming closeups together.
Students dabbling in moviemaking and live performance at the Butler County school collaborated on a documentary chronicling all the work that went into Freeport’s production of the musical “No, No, Nanette” last spring. The final 85-minute film was dubbed “The Making of the Musical” and was screened during a gathering of Freeport’s student body and faculty shortly before summer break 2023.
That will change next weekend when WQED airs a shortened 52-minute cut of “The Making of the Musical” during its weekly “Filmmakers Corner” program hosted by senior producer Minette Seate. Anyone interested in checking out this cross-disciplinary project can do so Dec. 23 at 10 p.m. on Pittsburgh’s PBS affiliate.
“I want people to see what little Freeport is able to do,” said Tawnya Lunz, a broadcast communications teacher and the film’s executive producer. “We have a little school district that I don’t think most people know about, and we have a pretty cutting-edge arts program here.”
Lunz has been teaching at Freeport for 25-plus years. She leads a documentary film class in which students are usually tasked with shooting their own 22-minute movies. Last year, though, Lunz had four students who she felt were capable of taking on a bigger challenge.
“I really wasn’t honestly sure we could accomplish this film the way I wanted it to be done,” Lunz admitted. “It exceeded my expectations for sure.”
Her student filmmaking team was comprised of then-seniors Jackson Buterbaugh and James Davis and then-juniors Julia Simon and Evan Ozimek. Buterbaugh and Simon served as the film’s main editors.
“We had never done anything like this before,” said Simon, now a Freeport senior. “I didn’t really think about how much work and dedication it would take to complete the project, but we still managed to get through it. It was a really fun experience.”
The other half of the equation was getting Freeport’s theater department on board. Tom Koharchik, Freeport’s longtime theater producer and grades 6-12 choral director, had enlisted Lunz and her students in 2020 to record a staged version of the 1946 Jimmy Stewart classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” as a COVID-friendly alternative to an in-person show.
He had no qualms about letting young documentarians run wild throughout the “No, No, Nanette” rehearsal process and was “blown away by the professionalism and detail” displayed by both Lunz’s film students and his budding thespians in “The Making of the Musical.”
“The amount of sacrifice we put into these productions, there are no words to describe it,” said Koharchik, now in his 18th year at Freeport. “When you have the opportunity to showcase to the world what’s actually happening behind the scenes, it makes it all worthwhile.”
Production started on “The Making of the Musical” during Freeport’s fall musical, “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.” While most of the documentary focuses on “No, No, Nanette,” that experience proved invaluable for the filmmakers and drama students as they got used to each other’s presences and artistic inclinations.
“Theater is already a very time-consuming activity to do,” said Anne Lindsay, a Freeport senior who played Pauline in “No, No, Nanette.” “We have 20 hours a week of rehearsals. To have a camera there, it was a learning curve to work around them and understand what they were doing.”
By the time rehearsals started for “No, No, Nanette,” everyone was so accustomed to having each other around that Buterbaugh, now a freshman at Butler County Community College, said he could just look at someone in the theater department and “they would just know, ‘Oh, I need to come put a mic on!’”
“We were one, instead of two separate parts working together,” he continued. “It was truly amazing.”
Simon and Buterbaugh put the finishing touches on “The Making of the Musical” shortly before the end of Freeport’s 2022-23 academic year following months of gathering footage and weeks of nonstop editing.
Lindsay appreciated how well they captured “the amazing thing we produced as theater students” that went on to win the most accolades at the 2023 Henry Mancini Awards, which annually celebrates high school musical theater achievements in Beaver, Butler, Lawrence and Mercer counties. Watching “The Making of the Musical” filled Koharchik “with great pride to see our school highlighted in such a fantastic way.”
Now WQED viewers get to check out the combined efforts of Freeport’s budding filmmakers and theater folk. Simon was just “grateful to work with such amazing people” and never thought their documentary would “get out to the world like this.”
“I think ‘The Making of the Musical’ is a great look at what it takes to put on a high school musical, and it showcases the enthusiastic local talent stepping into the world of documentary filmmaking — which makes it the perfect fit for ‘Filmmakers Corner,’” Seate told the Post-Gazette in a statement.
As someone who loves “teaching and showing other people’s talent,” Lunz urged Pittsburghers to keep their expectations for this totally Freeport-produced film as high as they would for anything else deemed worthy of a WQED debut.
“We treat young people as professionals,” she said. “We expect a level of excellence. ...
“High school kids made a real movie. It’s pretty awesome.”
Joshua Axelrod: jaxelrod@post-gazette.com and Twitter @jaxelburgh.
First Published: December 14, 2023, 10:30 a.m.
