Community helps save Frederick County school’s Shrek musical

Skyler Sales
·2 min read

FREDERICK COUNTY, Md. (DC News Now) — When the Linganore Drama Department came back from spring break they came back to some news that could alter their production of Shrek the Musical.

Luckily with the help of their entire community, their show was saved.

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Drama Teacher Angela Smithhisler was enjoying a trip with some of her students at Disney World when she got a bad feeling about the status of her drama department’s costumes and props.

“I came across an article and the headline caught my eye, it said Pittsburgh High School $8,000 out and no costumes and it sounded very familiar and I was starting to feel like an uneasy feeling because I was starting to feel a little bit uneasy about my own costume company,” Smithhisler explained.

Little did she know that company was the same company that was supposed to handle their costumes.

“I contacted my financial secretary, she reached out to the company and discovered that sort of the same thing had happened to us that they weren’t answering emails, they weren’t answering phone calls,” Smithhisler said.

“They had just kind of closed up shop overnight and there was no word of our Shrek costumes and or the $8,000 that we had spent.”

With no costumes and only a week until opening night, Smithhisler had sent out a call to action to their community and the response was overwhelming.

“That’s when we suggested the GoFundMe and started reaching out to other costume supply companies,” Drama Booster, Stephanie Hatmaker, said. “We had made an Amazon list and people just started pulling together and then I called around like, ‘who can sew?’ And ‘who can make stuff?'”

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Smithhisler says with the help of parents, boosters and the community their show is now set to stay on.

“It’s beautiful and inspiring to see that there were so many people who were willing to help and now we’ve got a whole slew of kids who are going to be on stage on Thursday wearing costumes and we have plenty of financial backing to help us recover,” Smithhisler said.

Opening day for the play is April 18 at 7 p.m.

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