Snoopy the dog: a loveable, moody best friend to Charlie Brown. But this cartoon canine is also a singing and dancing entertainer in “Snoopy! The Musical,” brought to life by freshman musical theatre major Isaac Nicolau.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, several theaters and live performance companies have been asking, “How are we going to do what we do?” Nicolau said. This question also rings true for him, both as an artist and a student.
Many college freshmen this year are missing out on in-person classes, regular club meetings and time with friends on campus this year. Nicolau said he has discovered that, while it isn’t what he planned for, there are still opportunities to learn and be involved.
The same is true for his experience with creating theatre amidst this pandemic. Recently, Nicolau was a part of a production of “Snoopy! The Musical,” a virtual show put on by Mooresville Community Children’s Theater in his hometown. This show, which premiered on Oct. 30, followed the stories of Snoopy and his friends in a comic strip style, with animated props and sets surrounding the characters in their version of the Peanuts world. Nicolau said this was a completely new experience for him. Recording sessions simply included him, the director and a green screen, while the rest of the process was achieved with the power of editing.
While acting in a room alone, reacting to cast members that weren’t actually there, Nicolau said, “It was tough for me to know what am I doing and is it working.”
Along with scene partners, Nicolau is used to feeding off of the energy of a live audience in a performance.
“The audience is almost like a guide,” he said. “When I make a joke…or I say a line in a specific way, the audience will react. They’ll laugh, they’ll shift in their seats… they’ll make some sort of indicator that I’m doing something right or wrong, but I didn’t have that.”
This connection with the audience is exactly what led Nicolau to pursue theatre four years ago. As a freshman in high school, Nicolau said he took his first theatre class because “my mom made me.” He then laughed as he said it was “love at first sight,” and he has been hooked ever since.
He decided to join his school’s spring musical that same year: A show called “Night of the Living Dead! The Musical!”, in which he played the role of a Bob Ross zombie, as well as another character towards the end of the show.
“I had this long awesome robe and this long Gandalf beard, it was great,” Nicolau said.
On the last night of the show, Nicolau said he was onstage as this character when he felt something start to go awry. “I had just done three dance numbers as Bob Ross…and I was sweating,” Nicolau said.
All of a sudden, his beard completely fell off in the middle of his last scene. “I am this beardless kid, 14-year-old scared boy on stage, and so the first thing I do is crack a beard joke.”
The audience was quiet, so Nicolau and his scene partner diverted to a completely improvised scene about beard jokes.
Eventually, Nicolau said, “I realized that the audience wasn’t quiet because it wasn’t funny. It was so funny that they had no air left to laugh, they were laughing so hard.”
By the end of the scene, the audience was on their feet for the pair of actors. “It was that moment that I realized that’s what I want to do,” Nicolau said. “I don’t want to do it for me. I’m not here to act for myself. I’m here to act for other people. I’m here to make them laugh…If I can just brighten someone’s day, that makes it all worth it.”
And Nicolau is still working towards making that possible today. While live theatre is being re-defined by the pandemic, “we’ve all had to figure out new ways to do the thing we’ve been doing the same for the past hundreds of years,” he said.
But Nicolau has been able to see this time as a source of reflection for artists such as himself.
“We can look back and see that we don’t always have to do things the same way,” he said. “It was this year that I realized I can go off and make something, anything I want.”
And that is just what he intends to do.
Photo by Marisa Fields-Williams
