Pali’s first Friday Night Live (FNL) show– an SNL-inspired comedy act of numerous sketches, two digital shorts, and a musical guest– of the 2025-26 school year took place on Friday, Oct. 18.
Students, some still wearing face paint from Pali’s homecoming football game, lined up to watch this comedy production at the Illusion Magic Lounge in Santa Monica.
This show was not only the first of the school year, but also the first FNL production without the direction of the now retired Pali theater teacher and director, Nancy Fracchiolla. Students ran almost the entire show and took on responsibilities that would normally be delegated to a teacher.
Senior Jonah Sachs, head of digital shorts and one of the on-stage actors, described his experience developing this performance.
“We had to find out how to pull this off on our own without teachers’ help,” Sachs said.
Sachs explained that some unexpected issues arose that the team had to overcome on their own.
“We were trying to shoot a short in the bathrooms on campus when we got kicked off halfway through, and we then had to get a permit to continue,” Sachs said.
According to senior Ella White, president of FNL and on-stage actress, FNL’s new advisor, Jamie Mazur, a USC Screen and Television writing graduate and alumni of both Pali and its FNL program, deferred more creative control to the students during the final stages of development.
“[He] gave us a rough block of direction and with this we were able to do rewrites, costumes, and rehearsals,” White said.
According to Sachs, Mazur’s directing differs from past FNLs with Fracchiolla’s directing.
“[Fracchiolla] was very hands-on with her specific vision while Jamie really loves to push the students to write and find new people [themselves],” Sachs said.
This FNL was the first Halloween-themed show in five years.
“The theme opened up a lot of opportunities for new sketches,” said White, who wrote the majority of the skits. “I always personally like having a theme that you have to write within because it can be hard to come up with random ideas out of nowhere.”
Sachs expressed that the student artists for FNL had little time to prepare for this show, as it was significantly earlier this year than its typical December schedule.
“The show was really, really down to the wire,” Sachs said. “We had very limited rehearsal time, and very limited writing time. We were writing scripts up until the day before the show.”
Senior Hill Leopold recognized that the runtime of the show was short in comparison to previous shows as a result of the early deadline of the production.
“In previous years [the shows] had been a little longer… It usually would come out later and [the early release] seemed to have an impact here,” Leopold said.
Despite the shorter runtime, Leopold felt that the show was special because FNL was able to connect the relatability of Halloween to being a student, making the performance even funnier.
“Everybody in the audience was laughing at the one skit where a student was being possessed in an exorcism… going crazy, asking to drop math…They really connected the theme to students because I can totally see kids freaking out about some classes like that,” Leopold said. “It just seemed so over the top, like, something you’d see in a South Park Halloween episode.”
White said that despite the difficulty of putting together a student run production, FNL student leadership is excited to continue to bring comedic entertainment to Pali and make people laugh.
“The world is very stressful right now,” White said. “FNL is too, but in a different, more fun way.”
