It was a first; it had never been done before. We were going to be the first Irish school to stage an amateur performance of this magnitude. We were going to stage Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Phantom of the Opera." When we first heard this we did not think we had the talent in our Transition Year Group to perform such a spectacular show. "The Phantom of the Opera," based on the French novel Le Fantome de L'Opera by Gaston Leroux is considered to be the most successful musical of all time and is the longest running show in Broadway history. We were going to have an up-hill battle to put a performance like this together in six weeks. Miraculously when auditions began we discovered we had an abundance of operatic singing talent in people we didn't even know could sing.
Over the next six weeks we spent every waking moment either rehearsing, making stage props, organizing costumes, creating the program and looking for sponsorship. For a group that would have spent the minimum amount of time possible in school we had now almost taken up residence in the school, some days spending from early morning to late into the night practicing, constructing and with all this hard work still having time to have fun. Even though we were 150 students we seemed to develop into one big family, looking out for and helping one another in any way we could. .
The performance of "The Phantom of the Opera" needed a theatre that would do it justice; we had a boring and basic sports hall. With a week to go this hall went through a dramatic transformation from the sports hall that last week we had used for football to what on the opening night looked like the inside of an actual theatre with tiered seating and state of the art lighting and a spectacular stage, created mainly by the students ourselves. For most students in Maynooth Post Primary, Wednesday the 1st February was no different to any other regular school day.