The show must go on and indeed it will for the Palmerton Area High School Drama Club.

During a board meeting Sunday night, Palmerton’s board of directors gave the stamp of approval to a drama club safety plan that will allow for the production of “Big Fish” to move forward, although under a lot different circumstances than normal.

Drama Club advisor Brent Harris said the plan would be to get the students inside “a piece at a time” and record the show with no audience present. The production would then be available as a streaming performance through the website https://phsdramaclub.ludus.com.

“People could purchase their viewing of the show and then watch it on the nights we would have held it in person, which will be the first Thursday through Saturday in August,” Harris said.

Like the original schedule for many other high school drama clubs, Palmerton’s production of “Big Fish” was canceled for the April 16-18 dates due to the COVID-19 school shutdown.

The drama club modeled its safety plan after the district’s recently approved resocialization plan, which allows Palmerton athletes to return to voluntary summer workouts.

Harris said the group will practice and rehearse outside as much as possible and all the normal precautions will be taken.

“We’ll be checking temperatures and monitoring symptoms as students arrive,” Harris said. “If someone shows any symptoms, they go home and can’t come back until they have medical clearance. If someone is confirmed to have COVID-19, that would shut us down.”

Taping the show and then releasing it, he added, will allow students to watch it at home and enjoy it with their families.

“I’ve been doing this over 10 years and we had bumps in the road, but never had anything that took the train off tracks and did not allow us to finish a show,” Harris said. “We’ll hit the ground running to give the best production possible given the circumstances. This is a show we all fell in love with and I’m grateful to the administration for taking the time to go over the safety plan with me.”

As for the return of the rest of Palmerton’s extra-curricular clubs, their return will be handled on a case-by-case basis.

“To have administration come up with separate return plans for all of the clubs would be very time consuming and take away from our return to school plan,” interim superintendent Dr. Alan Lonoconus said. “We thought it would be best for the individual clubs to present their own plans. Marching band and chorus are a lot different than student council or National Honor Society, for example. It’s going to be different on a case-by-case basis.”