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Wednesday, September 20, 2017
What we can learn from the Most Produced High School Musicals.
The Producer's Perspective: Last week, the Educational Theatre Association published their list of the most produced plays and musicals of the ’16-17 school year.
The article brings up the point that the most produced musicals correlate with a market value. After seeing the common trends between the most produced shows, artists can try to work on these types of materials to receive the largest royalties. This is a smart concept to make money. Though, it is hard to select shows that are popular and that someone enjoys working on. There was an emphasis on having fantastical elements, large and being an adaptation. I find this interesting because this isn't true necessarily for the most produced plays in high school. These shows do have big-ish casts but only a few started as movies. The shows also are a lot more realistic. I wonder why this is so and why the three relationships between the musicals don't correlate to the plays.
It's not hard pressed to believe that these are the most produced musicals of the year. In my high school, we always went for the big and most recognized musicals like Suessical, Cats and A Charlie Brown Musical. The theatre department was small and we wanted to make the biggest impact. In our heads, the biggest impact was a show that people had heard of and would want to come see. However, by doing such large scale and known shows we sacrificed production value and quality that could have been found in something perhaps a little less known. At the same time, high schools that do large scale and well heard of musicals are capable of getting more than just the theatre kids involved because these shows are known and loved by them. Personally I believe that there should be more of an attempt to find the middle ground between shows that students will want to participate in but that are still achievable and at quality level of production.
This article really helped put the high school musical type of shows in perspective. I’ve seen lists before of the most often high school produced musicals, but the only similarity I noticed was shows with a large ensemble. This article takes it a step farther with two other categories: “Fantasies: Except for Grease, they are all in magical worlds of some sort. Adaptations: Except for Grease, all are based on pre-existing source material.” I think fantasy shows lend themselves well to high schools; the sets and costumes can be as outlandish (or crummy looking) as they want to be. And as long as the designs look somewhat cohesive, you’re probably good. Fantasies have no true time period, so dressing, scenery, and accents don’t have to be spot on, like they would need to be for a period piece. I’d like to see high schools branch out a little more with their shoe choices, but it’s completely understandable why they won’t, or can’t.
I think this article was very oddly written. It asks many questions, but does not discuss any ideas towards those questions, which is pretty silly, if you have a platform to share them. I can see that their is a very sad factor involved in high schools doing the same shows for the playwrights. But, mostly I don't think it is something that is bad. High school is most kids real first introduction to theater, and the directors or teachers want it to be a good experience. Having a fun, large cast show, something students have heard does make a great opportunity to do exactly that. Also, the rights for all these shows have come out fairly recently so while high schools across the country may be doing the same shows, I assume that list changes with time and schools choose to do the newer shows. Personally, I have done eight of the shows on the list, and I am sure some people have done them all, but for what high school theater really is doing for students, thats okay.
I found it incredibly interesting to see what the top ten most produced shows were in highschools this last year, and even more interesting was out of those ten shows my highschool had only produced one since I was there. I like to think my highschool wanted to focus on shows less known and with a deeper message. During my sophomore year, my drama department put on Sweeney Todd as our fall mainstage musical. It was incredibly surprising to us all that the small private, episcopal community of my school would allow such dark content on the stage. But I remember the whole show as being one of the best experiences I have had to work on. I do think it is slightly concerning that half of the musicals being performed in highschools promote being a submissive female roles, especially in The Little Mermaid. Highschools should be focusing on how to broaden the minds of students and inspire them to push towards greater goals then settling down with a wife or husband.
In yonder days before Carnegie and Mellon put my heart in my work, I had worked on all of these shows with the exception of “Beauty and the Beast” (my high school did that show the year before I was a freshman) and “Grease”. I worry about what the prevalence of these musicals say about theater. High school is often the first exposure a person has to our art. I understand that many of these shows where chosen for their cast size (my school had a no-cuts policy for drama) so that as many people as possible can participate or have a role. All these musicals are aimed at adolescent or child audiences. They are all “fluff” as well. None of the shows on the list are controversial nor do they present any substantial opinion on the world. All the shows are easily recognizable by parents and audiences. It is not an adequate view of how I like to think about theater and what it’s purpose in society is.
When I saw the list of the most produced high school musicals I wasn't at all surprised. Commercial success would of course not be high on the list for a high school student wanting to perform. Especially since there is no promise of a successful career in the arts that would allow a student to perform after graduation, choosing plays based on revenue would not be foremost in their mind. The article doesn't really seem to go anywhere in answering the question of why these ten musical are the most popular. However, I would hazard that the musicals select are there for very specific purposes: they have large casts to accommodate as many students as possible, are family friendly, and many have catchy music that each performer would have likely grown up hearing and would want a shot at singing themselves. Add to that the fact that these shows were all once on Broadway and the appeal is obvious.
The most practical assumption one can make from this list of shows is that they were chosen because they have fairly family friendly material (or not family friendly material packaged in such a way that it appears to be) and because they have large cast sizes. It is encouraging to see high school shows being produced with large cast sizes because hopefully, that means many kids are getting involved with theatre at the high school level. Someone pointed out to me recently that the reason so many theatre professionals come from fairly privileged backgrounds is because to decide to study theatre in college or pursue theatre professionally, most likely one had to have been involved with theatre in high school, which means you attended a high school with at least enough money to support a theatre program. As arts programs face budget cuts, I wonder if we might see a dip in the number of students pursuing theatre as a career.
This list is so different from anything that my public arts high school did which tells you just how much money inner city schools are getting in Chicago. We always did the shows with cheap or no royalty rates, including Working, Sweet Charity, and School House Rock ( which we got for free because of prior connections to the composer). All the shows listed seem pretty big budget especially Shrek which requires a lot of makeup and possibly prosthetics. They all also involve magic and special effects like in Cinderella. It seems odd to me that high schools would be doing fantastical plays as they are not cheap. It's really interesting to me that the Addams Family is first. This and Grease seem like the best high school level shows on the list to me. They both seem like shows that challenge the actors in interesting ways. With Grease, this is the period and with The Addams Family it is the cultural expectation of how the characters will be played.
9 comments:
The article brings up the point that the most produced musicals correlate with a market value. After seeing the common trends between the most produced shows, artists can try to work on these types of materials to receive the largest royalties. This is a smart concept to make money. Though, it is hard to select shows that are popular and that someone enjoys working on. There was an emphasis on having fantastical elements, large and being an adaptation. I find this interesting because this isn't true necessarily for the most produced plays in high school. These shows do have big-ish casts but only a few started as movies. The shows also are a lot more realistic. I wonder why this is so and why the three relationships between the musicals don't correlate to the plays.
It's not hard pressed to believe that these are the most produced musicals of the year. In my high school, we always went for the big and most recognized musicals like Suessical, Cats and A Charlie Brown Musical. The theatre department was small and we wanted to make the biggest impact. In our heads, the biggest impact was a show that people had heard of and would want to come see. However, by doing such large scale and known shows we sacrificed production value and quality that could have been found in something perhaps a little less known. At the same time, high schools that do large scale and well heard of musicals are capable of getting more than just the theatre kids involved because these shows are known and loved by them. Personally I believe that there should be more of an attempt to find the middle ground between shows that students will want to participate in but that are still achievable and at quality level of production.
This article really helped put the high school musical type of shows in perspective. I’ve seen lists before of the most often high school produced musicals, but the only similarity I noticed was shows with a large ensemble. This article takes it a step farther with two other categories: “Fantasies: Except for Grease, they are all in magical worlds of some sort. Adaptations: Except for Grease, all are based on pre-existing source material.” I think fantasy shows lend themselves well to high schools; the sets and costumes can be as outlandish (or crummy looking) as they want to be. And as long as the designs look somewhat cohesive, you’re probably good. Fantasies have no true time period, so dressing, scenery, and accents don’t have to be spot on, like they would need to be for a period piece. I’d like to see high schools branch out a little more with their shoe choices, but it’s completely understandable why they won’t, or can’t.
I think this article was very oddly written. It asks many questions, but does not discuss any ideas towards those questions, which is pretty silly, if you have a platform to share them. I can see that their is a very sad factor involved in high schools doing the same shows for the playwrights. But, mostly I don't think it is something that is bad. High school is most kids real first introduction to theater, and the directors or teachers want it to be a good experience. Having a fun, large cast show, something students have heard does make a great opportunity to do exactly that. Also, the rights for all these shows have come out fairly recently so while high schools across the country may be doing the same shows, I assume that list changes with time and schools choose to do the newer shows. Personally, I have done eight of the shows on the list, and I am sure some people have done them all, but for what high school theater really is doing for students, thats okay.
I found it incredibly interesting to see what the top ten most produced shows were in highschools this last year, and even more interesting was out of those ten shows my highschool had only produced one since I was there. I like to think my highschool wanted to focus on shows less known and with a deeper message. During my sophomore year, my drama department put on Sweeney Todd as our fall mainstage musical. It was incredibly surprising to us all that the small private, episcopal community of my school would allow such dark content on the stage. But I remember the whole show as being one of the best experiences I have had to work on. I do think it is slightly concerning that half of the musicals being performed in highschools promote being a submissive female roles, especially in The Little Mermaid. Highschools should be focusing on how to broaden the minds of students and inspire them to push towards greater goals then settling down with a wife or husband.
In yonder days before Carnegie and Mellon put my heart in my work, I had worked on all of these shows with the exception of “Beauty and the Beast” (my high school did that show the year before I was a freshman) and “Grease”. I worry about what the prevalence of these musicals say about theater. High school is often the first exposure a person has to our art. I understand that many of these shows where chosen for their cast size (my school had a no-cuts policy for drama) so that as many people as possible can participate or have a role. All these musicals are aimed at adolescent or child audiences. They are all “fluff” as well. None of the shows on the list are controversial nor do they present any substantial opinion on the world. All the shows are easily recognizable by parents and audiences. It is not an adequate view of how I like to think about theater and what it’s purpose in society is.
When I saw the list of the most produced high school musicals I wasn't at all surprised. Commercial success would of course not be high on the list for a high school student wanting to perform. Especially since there is no promise of a successful career in the arts that would allow a student to perform after graduation, choosing plays based on revenue would not be foremost in their mind. The article doesn't really seem to go anywhere in answering the question of why these ten musical are the most popular. However, I would hazard that the musicals select are there for very specific purposes: they have large casts to accommodate as many students as possible, are family friendly, and many have catchy music that each performer would have likely grown up hearing and would want a shot at singing themselves. Add to that the fact that these shows were all once on Broadway and the appeal is obvious.
The most practical assumption one can make from this list of shows is that they were chosen because they have fairly family friendly material (or not family friendly material packaged in such a way that it appears to be) and because they have large cast sizes. It is encouraging to see high school shows being produced with large cast sizes because hopefully, that means many kids are getting involved with theatre at the high school level. Someone pointed out to me recently that the reason so many theatre professionals come from fairly privileged backgrounds is because to decide to study theatre in college or pursue theatre professionally, most likely one had to have been involved with theatre in high school, which means you attended a high school with at least enough money to support a theatre program. As arts programs face budget cuts, I wonder if we might see a dip in the number of students pursuing theatre as a career.
This list is so different from anything that my public arts high school did which tells you just how much money inner city schools are getting in Chicago. We always did the shows with cheap or no royalty rates, including Working, Sweet Charity, and School House Rock ( which we got for free because of prior connections to the composer).
All the shows listed seem pretty big budget especially Shrek which requires a lot of makeup and possibly prosthetics. They all also involve magic and special effects like in Cinderella. It seems odd to me that high schools would be doing fantastical plays as they are not cheap.
It's really interesting to me that the Addams Family is first. This and Grease seem like the best high school level shows on the list to me. They both seem like shows that challenge the actors in interesting ways. With Grease, this is the period and with The Addams Family it is the cultural expectation of how the characters will be played.
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