Festival Forced Indoors Again

By John Voket

The Grasso Marching Band Festival celebrated an unwelcome new tradition Saturday as nine competing acts and Newtown’s finale exhibition were forced indoors for a second year in a row because of inclement weather. The forced change of venue from the football field to the auditorium was particularly disappointing to Newtown High seniors who looked forward to strutting their talents on the field after last year’s event also was moved inside.

The judges were also forced to readjust their scope from individually scoring numerous aspects of the music and visual aspects of the planned maneuvers, to simply rating the competing acts’ overall performance.

Last Saturday’s event, the tenth to be hosted at NHS since its inception, featured competing bands from Bethel, Bridgeport, Central, Brien McMahon, Masuk, Naugatuck, New Milford, Norwalk, Shelton, and Ramsey, N.J. Unfortunately, due to the move inside, trophies for the top scoring performances were not presented.

“Now we’ve got two years worth of trophies in our storage room,” said event spokesperson Judy Rosentel.

The festival was named in honor of Joseph Grasso, founder of the Newtown High band program. Mr Grasso taught at the school from 1960 until his retirement in 1992.

Despite their exhibition-only set at this year’s Grasso Festival, the Marching Nighthawks featuring 109 members between the band and color guard, have enjoyed a successful year according to Ms Rosentel.

“We had our fifth marching band competition at Trumbull High School and we took first place in our class with our highest score so far this season,” she said. “We have taken home the first place trophy in our class at every competition this season.”

Ms Rosentel said the Trumbull competition was Newtown’s largest so far with 16 bands competing. That competition also included caption awards in each class, of which Newtown won for Outstanding Music, Outstanding Marching, Outstanding General Effect, and Outstanding Color Guard.

“Out of the 16 bands, we placed second overall and first in Class IV, which is broken down by band size,” she said proudly.