The musical Aida starts with a scene set in a museum. Many people are milling about, looking at different ancient relics from Egypt. From there, the musical moves to ancient Egypt where a story of forbidden love between a slave girl and a prince takes place. The musical ends with the same scene from the museum that it started with.

Opening night for Aida, put on by the HHS drama department, was this Wednesday, and the auditorium was packed full.

For the cast and crew of Aida, opening night was a success. Freshman Noah Mcintire is one cast member who thought this way.

“I think it went well for opening night because we had the snow days at the beginning of the week, and it could have been a lot worse,” Mcintire said.

It was evident that the audience was impressed by the show as well. As the show ended, the applause was nonstop, with a standing ovation for the stars of the show. Audience member senior Henry Requeno-Villeda believed the performance was incredible.

“It was amazing, it was absolutely amazing. I don’t think there was any part that I didn’t like,” Requeno-Villeda said.

Despite the overall impressed reactions to the show, Mcintire thought that they still could have done better on a few things.

“The technical aspect of it is not quite all the way there, like lighting,” Mcintire said.

Even with this criticism, freshman Evan Aigner, a member of the crew, thought that the crew has still come a long way considering the amount of time they had to prepare. Some of the costumes, including the Egyptian warrior’s uniforms, had to be stapled together because of lack of time.

Part of the struggle for the crew to prepare came from the uniqueness of the musical.

“A lot of the technical stuff like the lighting and backstage was hard for [the crew] to adjust to because it was really different from the rest of the shows,” Aigner said.

As far as the acting, though, Aigner thinks they did very well.

“We did best on people getting into character and really playing their parts,” Aigner said.

Aida has several more performances, ending this Sunday, Feb. 21.