The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, notorious for sending chills down your back. It’s a story about the headless horseman who slaughters the innocent townspeople, or so I thought it was.

OHS debut the play The Legend of Sleepy Hollow last Wednesday.

Knowing the previous versions of Sleepy Hollow, especially with it being so close to Halloween, I expected a thrilling and scary play. Instead, this legend that is suppose to frighten kids and keep them up at night turned into a love story.

The headless horseman was only mentioned once in the first act. The rest of the act was about the new schoolmaster Ichabod Cran (played by senior Samuel Tinlin) coming to town who instantly falls for Katrina Van Tassel (senior Lissie Hoover). However, Brom Bones (senior Austin Valenti) has feelings of his own for Katrina.

Once the first act was over, it seemed as if nothing really happened. The story didn’t really progress other than Ichabod thinking that he had a chance with Katrina. By this time I completely forgot that I was watching a play titled “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” instead of “Katrina’s Love Life”.

At the second act, the headless horseman is now mentioned a few more times but you still haven’t seen him and it’s almost like a false promise each time he is mentioned. He isn’t finally seen until the end of the play but only once for a few minutes.

All the while Katrina spends the next hour deciding if she likes Ichabod or Brom Bones. This once creepy story turned into Twilight placed in the 1790’s.

However, I must commend the brave students who acted in this play and the ones who helped put it together. The acting was very impressive and if I didn’t know better I would have been shocked if someone told me they were just high school students.

Aside from the talented three main characters, the grandmother (junior Tori Niemiec) did a flawless acting job as well.

I know how much hard work these students put into this play and that’s why it hurts me that the plot couldn’t have been better. I truly wanted to enjoy Sleepy Hollow.

Possibly because I already had preset assumptions of what the outcome of the play should have been. However when you name it “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and use a picture of the headless horseman as the only picture on the advertisement for the play, forgive me for thinking the play was going to be about the horseman.

I don’t know if this dramatic change from a Halloween story to a love story was intentional or not. Maybe they were trying to make it school appropriate. If it was intentional though, they should have simply giving the play a different name to reflect the actual plot better.

That way I would have been prepared for what the story really was about. It was like they were trying to wedge in parts about the headless horsemen into the love story rather than the other way around.

So if they titled the play “Katrina’s Love Story” instead I would have enjoyed it more instead of feeling like I was tricked out of a what could have been a great Halloween play.