SAN JOSE, CALIF— Silver Creek Drama is back for the 2024-2025 school year with three new plays happening over this school year, including an adaptation of the Disney movie “High School Musical”.

With Gabrielle Koizumi at the helm of all production, Silver Creek Drama will be producing several shows beginning with “High School Musical”. However, this first play will not happen until Feb. 27-28 next year. The other two productions will be “She Kills Monsters” and “Esperanza Rising”. According to Koizumi, these plays are taking place so much later in the year due to scheduling conflicts with other school events during the winter such as Winterfest and the dance concert. The production would not have been ready by November so the only choice left was to hold it in the second semester.

Students will be able to attend all Drama productions for free but tickets for parents and others will be available closer to the date of the showings of “High School Musical”. The same will apply to the other productions happening later in the year.

The selection of plays made for this year was done with one thing in mind, being diverse. “I wanted a focus on non-white leads, which in High School Musical there’s Gabriella Montez, Esperanza Rising takes place in Mexico, and She Kills Monsters was written by a Vietnamese American.”. There were other plays also considered such as “The House on Mango Street” and “West Side Story” however they were not chosen.  That doesn’t mean they have been completely thrown out though as they still could be done sometime in the future.

As always, the cast consists of students taking drama in either of the two periods. Mo Martinez who is cast as Troy Bolton in “High School Musical” has expressed a fair amount of nervousness about being on stage as this is her first time taking drama. That sentiment of anxiousness is not one shared by all the drama students as another student, Amairany Salgado who has been cast as Ms.Tenny, simply replied “nah”  when also asked if she felt nervous about being on stage. Something that they both could agree on however was the difficulty of having to both sing and dance simultaneously. Despite the difficulty, Koizumi has stated that both the classes “are doing great.” and that “They are actually a bit ahead than was planned”. From the sounds of that, it seems as if the direction of the musical is sailing smoothly.