GBN Marching Band is Off to See The Wizard

Friday night lights in Northbrook illuminated not just the season's first home football game but the debut performance of Glenbrook North's marching band in a Wizard of Oz-inspired routine.

Seated together on one side of the packed bleachers, roughly 90 band members in white uniforms were abuzz as they waited for the halftime show. They answered cell phone calls; stood up to talk to the band parents behind them, decked in Spartan green and gold; and generally bobbed with excitement.

"It's a lot of work and it's a lot of fun," said band president and senior John Seno.

Seno has been playing in the voluntary group all four years of high school, and said he had been practicing the evening's routine since he got the score last spring—between summer jobs at Ravinia and Glencoe Golf Club.

This year's show, titled "A Journey Through Oz," is special because band directors Rich Chapman and Mark Running, along with their staff, arranged the score based on music from the original 1939 Wizard of Oz film, from 1978's The Wiz and from Wicked, the contemporary Broadway musical.

"We had actually played some music from The Wiz last year in the spring in the concert band and the kids liked it," Chapman said.

"They're very excited about it; it's very fun music," said Adrienne Levin, president of the band parent's organization. Her daughter, Sophie, a senior, has played clarinet in the marching band for the past four years and her son, Lewis, is a sophomore who has played the quint tenor drums in the band for the past two years.

Although Lewis was away at camp this summer, Levin said he was always practicing—even without his drums.

"If you've ever met a person who plays a percussion instrument, they're constantly drumming, with pencils, with silverware, with their hands, with rolled up pieces of paper," Levin said. "At the dinner table, in the car on the back of my seat; wherever he is, he's drumming."

Band members were given the music when the last school year ended to practice over the summer, then spent a week rehearsing intensively at Camp Henry Horner in Fox Lake. Back home, the thumping sounds of the band can now be heard around Northbrook as they practice at GBN on Tuesday and Thursday evenings.

"Some kids came with their music memorized and some kids came without looking at their music at all," Chapman said, emphasizing that Friday night's performance was a trial run. "If we make it through without falling down, that will be good. We're two weeks into our season that runs eight, 10 weeks. This is going to be what we call a survival night."

Color guard captains Katherine Scully and Vanessa Killian, both seniors, also emphasized the preliminary nature of the Sept. 3 performance in the Spartans home opener.

"Our routines have changed so many times. We're changing parts of it 10 minutes before we perform," Killian said. 

When the football players left the field for halftime, Glenbrook North had 21 points to Lane Tech's zero. The band marched onto the field from the side opposite the scoreboard, in step in their white uniforms with green and gold trim.

Wearing white gloves, a black T-shirt and black pants, drum major Annie Luc climbed the podium to lead the band in its first tune, from The Wizard of Oz. Luc's great aunt is one of the last surviving Munchkins from the original 1939 movie, Chapman noted, "so she's got Munchkin blood in her."

While the band twisted out of one formation and into another, the color guard tossed hula hoops and gently waved multicolored flags. The 19-member squad wore black jumpsuits with yellow stripes curving down the front—to represent the yellow brick road.

It was a chilly, blustery evening, and the wind made the band's sound a little tough to hear. But when they finished, the band parents stood up and cheered uproariously. Someone threw a little gold football back and forth.

"If you really want to get a feel for the show, come see it at Wheeling on the 25th of September," Chapman said. "There's a lot of things we want to add."

The band performs at home games and will take the show on the road for competitions at Wheeling High School on Sept. 25, Prospect on Oct. 2 and Lincoln Way on Oct. 16.