Last year it was Gomez, Morticia and the rest of the Addam’s family who sounded so crisp and clean and right there. This year it was Quasimodo and the resplendent Esmeralda who seemed practically in your lap.

The secret? The pit. And the talented group of musicians assembled there to do their thing.

The New Ulm High School Theater Department ditched the piped-in orchestra sound for a second year straight in favor of actual musicians, and it paid off.

In the little space adjacent to the stage known as the pit, ten musicians combined their talents to produce sounds and beats that together with the entire musical production staff helped bring to the audience an unforgettable musical experience.

Theater Department head and production director Carissa Cowles is excited about the development. “The overall impressiveness of it – the ‘wow’ factor, is what I like most about it,” Cowles said. “I also like the live performance more because they are able to be more flexible with the actors singing on stage, they can go with the flow of it better,” she said.

Although musicals and theater productions have been performed in the NUHS auditorium since construction of the school in 2017, use of the orchestra pit really only got into full swing last year with the production of The Addam’s Family Musical.

That is due in large part to the technical difficulty of the music. “The music that we get for these shows is literally scored for Broadway productions,” pit director Dan Olson said. “So you’re looking at professional music. And that’s really difficult for students at our level.”

“The fortunate thing is that we’ve had some talent come through the last couple years that is capable of attacking it,” Olson said. “We’ve had three or four students who are up for the challenge, and then we grab some volunteers, whether they are parents or other members from the community to fill things out.”

There are other challenges involved in coordinating a live pit orchestra. Olson said that “making sure the pit is not over-powering the singers on the stage” is one of them.

“The other thing is matching with what is going on onstage,” Olson said. “My job is to be able to watch the stage and direct the orchestra at the same time. There are moments when the actors skip lines or jump ahead, and we have to go with that,” he said.

And then there is the pit itself. As a bit of a hold-over term from days past, the pit traditionally was located below the front of the stage, which is where it got its name.

Technically speaking, the “pit” in the NUHS auditorium is more like a room, but that term lacks the swag and flair of the original term. Either way, the sound is sweet – and loud – just the way the audience likes it.