When Buffalo Grove High School freshman Ryan Eriksen decided to join the school’s well-known show choir, Expressions, at the start of the school year, he did so reluctantly.
He said his friend, fellow freshman Jon Olbur, kept nagging him to check out a rehearsal for Expressions, which included many girls but needed more guys.
“I finally said I’d do it — just to shut him up,” Eriksen recalled.
Now, as the final curtain closes on the entire show choir, Eriksen said he wishes he had more time to perform with the award-winning group.
During this past weekend, Buffalo Grove High School’s Expressions show choir put on its last production, nearly a month after school officials announced April 6 that the program would be canceled at the end of the school year in early June.
For its annual Big Show, which featured performances on May 11, May 12 and May 13, students in Expressions sang and danced to the theme, “A Journey Through High School,” capping a 43-year run for the local show choir.
“I had the time of my life,” Eriksen, the freshman baritone, said. “Seeing this end, it’s definitely tough.”
Principal Jeff Wardle has said the move to cancel Expressions was about how to best prepare students for their futures.
Both a class and co-curricular activity, Expressions, which currently includes 39 singers and dancers, 13 band members, and six technical crew members, typically traveled for performances and earned national recognition along the way.
But both Wardle and choral department director Debora Utley have said the show choir now requires too much of students’ time.
The time commitment, they said, prevented some of the students from participating in other clubs and teams at Buffalo Grove High School. They also want to try and offer music courses that could better prepare students for programs in college, which increasingly offer program involving a cappella, jazz and gospel choirs, officials said.
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During the first Township High School District 214 board meeting after the April 6 announcement, dozens of students and parents were visibly emotional and stunned following the announcement that Expressions would soon end.
“This is a program like no other,” said Dick Sarnowski, who came to the Miller Theatre at the high school May 11 to watch the Big Show. “I understand why they’re shutting it down, but it’s hard to see it end. There’s a lot of emotions.”
Sarnowski, who is stepfather of senior Henry Johnston, an Expressions member from Arlington Heights, agreed that the club had been a massive, year-round time commitment. But he said the show choir has helped boost Johnston’s confidence and improved his stage presence.
Alumni of Expressions, who came to watch the final Big Show, said the experience helped them grow both personally and professionally.
When the show choir launched into “Let’s Misbehave,” Wendy Schwartz, a 1993 graduate of Buffalo Grove High School, said she became emotional.
As the wardrobe assistant for all four years of Big Shows during her school days and a participant in musical theater, Schwartz said the first play she acted in was “Anything Goes,” in which she sang “Let’s Misbehave.”
“That got to me,” Schwartz said of hearing it again more than 25 years later in the same theater. “I’m sad. It’s sad to see it go. It brings back a lot of memories.”
Norm Vagn, a 1987 graduate of Buffalo Grove High School, was a member of the show choir and now lives in Florida, teaching music at Riverview High School in Sarasota.
Although he did not attend Expressions’ final performance, he said he has been disheartened by the group’s disbandment.
The baritone singer and trombone player credited the Expressions’ first director, Linda Anderson, with showing him how music could affect his life. He said he even met his wife through the group after he started dating Melissa Paisley, now Melissa Vagn, as a student.
“Probably the biggest reason that I became a teacher is because of Linda and the Expressions,” Vagn said. “I wish it could go on forever but sometimes, things just have to change.”
As for the current group of students in Expressions, some students were looking forward to performing with the show choir as they advanced through high school, Eriksen said.
The once reluctant freshman said he was planning to stay with Expressions during the next three years.
“I’m not fine with it,” Eriksen said. “It’ll be fine, eventually.”
Twitter @RonnieAtPioneer