Spring Sing, which takes place Friday at Pauley Pavilion, is usually well known for its plethora of musical acts. Yet what holds the show together are the skits and videos in between, which also serve as segues into the next musical performance.
The group of people responsible for such skits is Company, made up of 12 students bound by a love for performing and a knack for being funny, while acting as the masters of ceremonies for Spring Sing.
Shane Billings, a fourth-year English student who has been a part of Company for three years, said that before his first year in Spring Sing, he had never done comedy before or acted in front of such a large audience. Yet when showtime came, only one word could describe it..
“It was just exhilarating,” Billings said. “When you work for three months with a group of people for so long, you just learn to trust them.”
Most acting groups at UCLA have prewritten material to work with. For Company, the participants are in charge of writing the script. This hands-on experience is what Company director Kelsey Balance, a third-year communication studies student, said makes the group so talented and well-received on campus.
“No one (in Company) has just one talent that they can do and that they’re really good at ““ they all are multitalented. Everybody writes, everybody acts, everybody sings,” Balance said.
Balance, along with Spring Sing executive director Aly Yarris, was in charge of auditions for the group. The members of Company change every year, in order to keep the material and humor fresh.
“This year, with a fresh new group, it’s been really fun since we’ve been able to bring a new twist to everything, new issues, new aspects of campus to talk about,” Balance said. “There’s been so much pop culture recently that has been really progressive, … so we’ve been able to comment on that.”
The topics covered include anything and everything, from dining halls to iPhones. Fourth-year sociology student Madison Vanderberg, a Company member for three years, said that the logistical process involved in trying to find humor and then relaying that to an audience was more difficult than expected.
“It’s harder than I thought. It’s hard to make people laugh. You just write stuff until people laugh, and if not, you try again,” Vanderberg said. “In the past, we always have USC jokes, Facebook jokes, basically anything on campus that is remotely funny, we try to draw that out and make that funny.”
The biggest challenge is to try to make all of that funny for people who do not go to UCLA, since the audience is composed of students, alumni and parents.
“Trying to appeal to all those different audiences and trying to make the most people laugh at once, that definitely has been a challenge,” Balance said. “Yet overall, everyone just loves Spring Sing and loves the event at UCLA, so we keep that in mind.”
Yet it is not just the script that the group needs to take care of. They also choreograph their own dances, sing their own songs, find their own costumes and props and edit all of their videos. Vanderberg, having a background in dance, was in charge of choreography.
“We have two guys that have had experience filming and editing so they took the reins on that. And because I have dance experience, I’ve been choreographing,” she said. “We’re all Renaissance people, I guess you can say.”
The group has been meeting every day for the past few weeks in preparation. Even with showtime closing in, during this past week there was still work to be done including making props, buying costumes and last-minute script editing, which can sometimes occur right up to performance time.
One of these last-minute things includes writing introductions for the various musical groups.
“We actually haven’t written that part yet,” Vanderberg said. “We don’t even know which skit will lead up to what performance, but once we know that, then we can write the funny lead-in to the next act.”
Despite the hectic nature of the past few days and the lingering logistical uncertainties, there is one thing for sure.
According to Billings, the finished product is going to be very entertaining.
“What we’re doing onstage is so fun and so visible and so apparent, it’s hard not to have fun at the same time,” Billings said. “If the audience can see that we’re having fun, they’ll have fun, and that’s something that’s always guaranteed at Spring Sing.”