Go backstage at Suffern High School spring musical 'Into the Woods'

Take a look backstage at Suffern High school’s spring musical, "Into the Woods," featuring over 130 students involved in all aspects of the production, from set design and construction, stage crew, orchestra, audio and lighting, as well as three separate casts.

“Into the Woods” includes music by Stephen Sondheim and many fairy tale characters like Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Rapunzel and Jack and the Beanstalk.

"Over the past few months, the students and staff have worked tirelessly to provide a wonderful theater experience," said director Randall Schwartz. "When selecting a show, we look to see what our strengths are, and then we try to find a show that will best showcase those strengths.

"Those strengths, a deep bench of highly talented actors, musicians and builders. That actually created a problem for us: How could we provide enough major roles for all this talent, while still providing a complete theater experience for the numbers of students that were auditioning, while providing instrumentation to help feature our enormous world class pit orchestra? 'Into the Woods' gave us the orchestration we were looking for. It wasn't easy, but it was worth it!"

Tripling the roles gave understudies a chance to perform with the schools extended show schedule, with the main cast performing Thursday night, Friday night and Saturday night. The matinee cast performed a Saturday afternoon show and the concert cast performed a concert preview Monday night of the show week.

All three casts prepared the show together and had the chance to perform with the orchestra on the Suffern High School stage.

This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Suffern High School spring musical boasts over 130 cast and crew