“We were in the middle of rehearsal, the middle of a scene, and I heard some shots,” Marjory Stoneman Douglas High drama teacher Melody Herzfeld recalls about February 14, 2018 in the trailer for “Song of Parkland.” That was the day a former student entered the school and, using a semiautomatic AR-15 assault rifle, killed 17 people. “It was like being in a war zone,” Herzfeld says in the documentary.
After the tragedy, when Herzfeld and her students returned to school, they decided to continue work on their production, the school’s annual children’s play. “You always hear ‘The show must go on,'” one of the drama pupils says. “We all knew what we needed to do.” “This was something we had to finish, especially something like this, which is for kids,” another student explains.
Directed by Amy Schatz (“A Child’s Garden of Poetry”), “Song of Parkland” follows Herzfeld and her students as they rehearse and put on their play and try to process their grief — against the backdrop of the grass roots gun control movement the Parkland teens galvanized.
“It is the most important show that you’re doing — probably ever,” Herzfeld tells her class during a pep talk.
Schatz is a seven-time Emmy winner. She’s picked up trophies for “A Child’s Garden of Poetry” and “Through a Child’s Eyes: September 11, 2001,” among other children’s programming.
Herzfeld received the Tony Awards’ excellence in theater education prize last year. Her theater program at Marjory Stoneman Douglas was also awarded $10,000 as part of the honor.
“Song of Parkland” premieres on HBO February 7.
