Tech Week

Cast vs. Crew #2

by Lindsay Champion, Dani Martineck (Narrator), Bianca Bryan (Narrator)

The full story of a junior high musical production, told exclusively from the POV of the kids backstage. It's High School Musical , from behind the scenes . . . without the high school. THIS IS BOOK TWO OF A TRILOGY.

In this sequel to Setting the Stage, there's one week left until opening night of  The Musical, and nothing is going right backstage.

The set has collapsed, the crew's headsets don't work, and Ella, the stage manager, just quit in a fury. The cast and crew are playing pranks on each other, and Willow, the soundboard operator, is working on a scheme that will turn the feud into all-out war!

Levi, the tech lead, and Rosa, the star of the show, are caught in the middle. Can they unite the cast and crew in time to actually rehearse? Or will the chaos force them to take sides and destroy their showmance?

The teachers call it "tech week." The kids call it "hell week." Whatever you call it, this is the week that the drama of drama club gets real.

Genres: Middle Grade, Theatre

Audible Audio

First published June 30, 2026

About the author

Lifelong theater geek Lindsay Champion made her stage debut as a tiger in her second-grade musical. Since then, she's built sets, run the light board, operated the spotlight and (her favorite) stage managed. She is a graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and was the Features Editor at Broadway.com. She writes books about kids discovering and falling in love with the arts. She is the author of the YA novel SOMEDAY, SOMEWHERE and the middle-grade drama club series CAST VS. CREW.

Reviews

[Katrina (at)FlirtingWithFiction · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full review to come!

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ah, the hurricane of Tech Week! The middle school is staging "Curie: the Musical" and Murphy's Law is strong in this production. Ella, the meticulously organized stage manager, just quit after a major set piece she'd worked on for ages fell apart, and she lost her theater keys to the mistake of trusting someone who used them illicitly. Levi, the Tech Lead and Ella's (former?) bestie, is in a showmance with Rosa, the lead actor, breaking all the conventions that cast and crew should never date. Plus, he's back in touch with his parents, and hoping they've set themselves straight enough that maybe he could live with them again? Willow, the reluctant sound manager (she had detention), is both over the ridiculous prank war between the cast and crew, and going rogue with some pranks of her own. The director is at her wits' end, ready to cancel the show if the kids can't keep it together.

I love theater and theater stories, but wow, do I feel for this director! So many of the kids seem to take the show for granted, and that a vicious prank war is just part of the experience rather than destroying community, hurting people either literally or emotionally, and damaging the set and props and the theater itself. The author does a great job of making the characters really distinct, so that even though there are multiple storylines, I didn't get anyone confused and I cared about all of them. One thing I really loved was that when it really mattered, Levi didn't make a dumb decision, but went and got a responsible adult who helped him without question. Great modeling! Also great worldbuilding for all of us theater nerds. Will the show even make it to the stage, if they can't even make it through a single full run-through? Guess we'll find out in the next book! Thanks to Libro.FM for a free educator copy of the audiobook.