Julie Boor, a senior in the School of Communications, hasn’t been vigorously job searching like most seniors. Instead, she’s spent most of her senior year in producers meetings and rehearsing in Cahn. Considering that she’s the Executive Producer for the largest student produced musical in the country, Dolphin Show, and after our conversation, I’m pretty sure she’ll have no trouble flushing out her resume with these experiences.
Julie (right) with her co-producer, Lucas McMahon (junior)
How do you juggle what is basically a professional level career producing the Dolphin Show, with school and a social life…not to mention finding a job?
Well I definitely thought ahead when I was planning this year out. I found out that I’d be co-producing the show in April, and then I was able to plan my class schedule accordingly. Luckily I filled up a lot of classes in the first three years so I’ve only had to take three classes this year! And I also just planned my extracurriculars so that I could spend pretty much allll my time working on Dolphin Show.
Is it hard to have a social life with everything that you’re involved with?
Not really, because there are so many people working on the show, it’s about 150 people, that I’ve gotten to spend a lot of time with them, both working on Dolphin and out having fun. And I’ve gotten to meet a lot of new people through the show – so I’d say I do spend a lot of the day working…but there’s plenty of time for play as well!
How did you originally get involved with Dolphin Show?
Sophomore year I decided that I really wanted to get involved with The Wizard of Oz, because I really love that show. So I joined the team as the Assistant Director of Outreach and I had an awesome time doing that! So then I interviewed to be on the executive board [of Dolphin Show] my junior year. Last year, I served as Director of Community Programming [on Parade] – which is kinda just a fancier way of saying outreach which is what I had done the year before. And I just had a blast! I wanted to be involved here more so I just put more time and energy into it – so I interviewed to produce in April.
That’s so great, Congratulations! When did you get interested in producing? Was that always something you knew you wanted to do or was it just your interest in Wizard of Oz your sophomore year that sparked the whole thing?
Actually, I first produced sophomore year for the Jewish Theatre Ensemble. I co-produced Twelve Angry Men for them, and I really had no idea what producing really meant, but some people on JTE approached me and said “you would make a great producer so you should come out and interview to do this job for us!” and I wasn’t really sure what I was doing [laughs]. I was undecided and I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do with life, so I just kinda took their advice and I showed up for the interview and my friend and I got selected to produce this big show. So that was my first experience producing and I had a great time! Then I didn’t produce junior year I just did that community programming work for Dolphin, and had an awesome time with that. So this year I was able to combine those by producing for Dolphin.
What was your role in choosing Ragtime for this year’s production?
The way it works is that the first people chosen for the [Dolphin Show] team are the producers. Then within about two weeks we hold interviews for directors and we started working with Michael Holtzman [this year’s director]. And then we spent about the next three weeks looking at tons and tons of scripts and scores, and together the three of us [my co-producer and director], with the input of Arts Alliance because Dolphin Show is a partner group with Arts Alliance, picked Ragtime.
Dolphin Show is a big deal – it’s the largest student produced musical in the country. Why did you choose Ragtime?
It’s a really ambitious show. And since we do have the opportunity to work in Cahn which is such a large space with awesome resources and since we do have this enormous team of really hard-working and talented students, we decided that everyone would get the most out of this learning experience if we did pick a really enormous and challenging show. We were definitely looking for something big in scale – and Ragtime is definitely that. It’s also just a really awesome show [laughs]. It’s got beautiful stories that everyone can relate to, and it has really awesome music – the score won a tony award. We thought this was a show that the whole campus would get excited about and would want to come out and see.
What would be your absolute, crazy, out of this world dream job?
Oh gosh. I need to figure that out because I’m a senior and I’m graduating! I think I would really love to work in the business side of theatre. I had an internship doing advertising for Broadway shows this summer and I had a blast doing that! It’s really fun to be able to work on what you love in the office – and then there’s always really fun things going on outside the office too, like opening night parties and stuff like that.
It sounds like this has been such a great experience. Can you pick a favorite memory?
That’s really hard. Everything has been super fun and I’ve gotten to work with so many people. One of my favorite memories was when we were casting the show, because it was just so fun at call backs to see people come and sing these songs that we have been thinking about for months. Another favorite would be…the week between Christmas and when school starts spent building the set. That is an awesome week because we just get to finally put these plans into reality by actually building the set. It’s so fun because we don’t have class to get in the way and we get to spend eight hours a day together building this set and then at night have a lot of fun! We have a New Year’s party…and stuff like that [laughs].