Back to School After a Year of Hard Lessons

AMERICAN THEATRE: Coming back to campus after spending my senior year online never ceases to feel incredibly weird for me. Yet I still come back to work front of house for the Washington, D.C.’s American University musical theatre program’s first in-person musical since the pandemic, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. As people enter through the stage door, it’s a parade of returns as I hug a friend, then a professor I have not seen in person for what seems like forever. I take tickets, a process that hasn’t changed as much as the one at the box office, where proof of vaccination is required. Then I settle in for the show, and it’s like time hasn’t passed at all.