For the last seven years, under the direction of drama teacher Anthony Kinney, Logansport High School has put on The Variety Show to showcase the talents and variety of its students—a well-honored and anticipated tradition amongst LHS students and faculty. It all begins with Kinney accepting sign-ups to then later begin auditions until he has his final roster of around 16-22 students, often including group or duo performances. After a few rehearsals and tech work the show is ready to be presented.
This year, The Variety Show had 24 participants with two of them being large group performances and exactly 17 performances. The variety of LHS students allowed the show to include singing, dancing from k-pop to large choreography, a personally written piece on the piano and a group performance of a mariachi band.
“This was one of the strongest shows from front to back that we had here,” Kinney said “Just started off solid at the beginning with the dance team and ended up super solid with the band at the end.”
The very first performance was a group choreography performance by the LHS Dance Team dancing to “Thriller” which greatly enticed the audience for the rest of the show. Waking up the audience from their previous classes and giving them the chance to begin letting off tons of energy before fall break.
“The crowd was great, we had over 700 students out at this one and they were singing along with some songs,” Kinney said. “They were pretty respectful of the performers and they had a good time.”
There were so many amazing performances that the crowd ate up, specifically junior Haven Malone and sophomore Tyler Strantz dancing to “Crazy,” senior Isabela Pedro singing and dancing to “Besitos,” Ash Lupke singing “Can’t Help Lovin That Man of Mine” from Show Boat and Jennifer Melecio singing “Back to Black.”
“It went as well as I would’ve hoped for both performers and the crowd, I can go down the list and tell you about every single one of them and how proud I am of them,” Kinney said. “We have people who have been in the musicals here and have sung that way and they were great, we had people like Jennifer, Isabela and Daniel who haven’t performed like this in front of 700 people, you gotta have some guts to do that and they should be super proud of the job that they did.”
And of course, the amazing closer, La Banda La Berry featuring seniors Arturo Alvarez-Gomez, David Escobedo, Samuel Esqueda, Ariel Loran, Anthony Zarate and junior Miguel Zarate who each played traditional Mariachi instruments to the songs La Quebradora and El Toro Mambo. With their performance getting every single student in the crowd to cheer even before they started playing.
“It ended up super solid with the band at the end,” Kinney said. “They were probably the best closer we’ve ever had.”
After just a few seconds of playing the crowd went cheering at the edge of their seats to 700 people all standing in applauds and recognition for a humble mariachi band that started less than a year ago. After a minute or so of playing, there were tens of students dancing in the aisles as if they were at a live concert having the time of their lives listening.
“It’s honestly a very cool experience to be able to see people able to connect with the music that we play,” Anthony Zarate said.
