This year’s spring play will be William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” Manhattan High School’s Thespian troupe is performing this piece as the spring play. Auditions for the play were Wednesday and Thursday. They were hosted together with auditions for “Salute to Broadway,” a yearly event where students perform acts that have been performed on Broadway.

“I am going to be an actor in the future,” junior Wesley Danielson said. “I figured it would be really good to have a few Shakespeare plays under my belt. And since the school’s now doing ‘The Tempest,’ which is the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone, I felt that it was an opportunity that I could not afford to miss.”

The requirement for auditioning for the play was to portray something written by Shakespeare, like a sonnet or a monologue from one of his plays. For “Salute To Broadway,” on the other hand, actors were allowed to perform any kind of scene that from a Broadway show.

“In my audition I did ‘Sonnet 130’ by Shakespeare,” freshman Grace Frankie said. “I like how [Uthoff]  gives us tips, like ‘try this’ and ‘can I see you do this?’ and how she lets us have freedom with it.”

The play features mostly men, but that didn’t stop girls at MHS from auditioning for it, too.  

Most students auditioning felt a mixture of pressure, nervousness and excitement. There were an even number of people auditioning for “Salute to Broadway” and “The Tempest” respectively, but there were also some students who decided to audition for both, such as freshman Emma Kellogg.

“It feels kind of surreal, you know,” Kellogg said. “You get into high school, and everything is scary and you don’t know where you quite fit in, but like when you get back on stage when you’re standing there and you’re singing and you’re building up this high note that you wonder, ‘how is this coming out of my mouth?’ You feel at home. It really opens you up.”