Wednesday, March 13, 2019
High School Musicals: What Are the Top Shows for Schools?
www.broadwayworld.com: From Broadway superstars to Broadway super fans; Tony winners to Tony viewers- most lovers of the arts can trace their passion back to humble origins- their high school theatre programs. According to the 2018 EDTA High School Play survey, over 26,000 US high schools have a theatre program, which means that hundreds of thousands of teenagers are bit by the theatre bug every year.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
13 comments:
I thought this article was really interesting. I think it’s fascinating to see the shows that are most popular among high schools, and that they are all mostly shows that are geared towards children and audiences on the younger side. According to this list, high schools tend to avoid more complex shows and go down a more lighthearted route. I don’t think that there is anything wrong with this but I also think there is value in exploring more layered and complicated shows. My high school had more of a range in picking its musicals, from West Side Story to Into the Woods, and I think that really allowed our actors to experience a range of roles, some being more simple and some being a lot more interesting. On the technical side, this also allowed for completely different design styles for each show. While I assume that this list isn’t actually a comprehensive survey of every high school, I would hope that more high schools begin to explore options that appeal to more than just a young audience.
I loved reading this article because it gave me an insight into how schools come to decide of their annual repertoire. How the schools strive to hit the balance of choosing shows that are entertaining for the masses and that are challenging for their actors.
It is clear from this article that the shows do choose to go the light-hearted road, where the masses can enjoy the visual that they are witnessing. Schools like to choose shows whose creation processes will be fun, easy to handle yet offer something to the actors, and the end result would be good experience for the audiences.
But the catch in this selection process is that often the schools end up going in to the "too easy" route, where the actors end up doing roles that are either too easy or do not have a lot of substance for the actors to dug their teeth into. I feel that that is a point that the schools should particularly pay attention to, so that the creation process is a huge learning curve for everyone involved.
I wish schools were not so limited in what they were allowed to perform. I was lucky enough to go to a high school which believed in students being able to handle mature content and grow from it. Our productions always sought to comment on what we as students were seeing and experiencing which is part of what got me so invested in theater in high school more than when I was growing up listening to Grease. In the past, my high school has performed Ragtime, Cabaret, Putnam County, and Pippin. Sound familiar? Like CMU, we were given the freedom to perform challenging works which were not all that kid-friendly most of the time and I could not be more grateful for that. I also had the experience when I was still in public school of constantly being censored. Any kind of crude joke was cut from scripts that were actually written for our age in the first place. I hope when my generation is putting our kids through school, our PTA won't be as strict and will recognize the importance of performing art that makes us question rather than repeating a repertoire that has been in our vocabulary since preschool.
To be expected. The only surprise is Wizard of Oz is on the list, because even at the high school level one begins to realize that the movie just does not translate to stage very well and people cannot get away from doing bad impressions of the actors from the films. It is interesting because of all the shows on the list, they are entirely sappy, all except for Into the Woods that can be very dark, and occasionally realistically dark, and over all depressing. I wonder why exactly it is so popular, whether it is the ease of producing a storybook based tale, the amount of characters, or it might be the actual quality and genius of Sondheim’s lyrics. I am not surprised Beauty and the Beast is number one. It has a good story, well developed characters, a well written book, and numbers both from the film and written or the stage that are far superior to the new ones written for the film. I hope it gets a revival on Broadway, because it is just so wonderful. I played Cogsworth, and he will always be part of me.
This article just flashbacked me to my entire 1st-12th academic career at my school. Luckily at my high school, we were very well endowed to do the shows we picked for our season. And a lot of them are on this list, in fact, they just did Little Shop of Horrors this school year. As Kaylie said, I wish high schools weren’t so limited in the content of musicals. All the language is cut out and some messages are lost through a couple edits to appease the parental and student audiences. Coming from an arts high school, we had the talent to do so many great shows. Like Lion King (not the stupid Jr. version), so much amazing talent could’ve gone into a show like this, but tours and copyright forbit high schoolers from experiencing the same shows they just spent over a hundred dollars to watch. I hope there is a day where schools options aren’t so limited anymore and high school students can experience more complex shows.
I was not shocked by any show on this list except for Annie. That show to me is one that I have never seen done at a high school nor would I really ever want to see it done at a high school. A good portion of that cast is young children so they would either do it with high schoolers or give a major portion of roles in a high school show to children that are brought in. Like many people, I am disappointed by the options schools have for shows because of content. I was lucky enough to be able to work on shows such as Spring Awakening, RENT, Ragtime, Avenue Q and Spelling Bee. I think not being a school and rather a community youth theatre help us get away from some of the pushback about content but I still wish every high schooler had the opportunity to do both fun and light-hearted shows like Seussical and the Disney classics as well as shows with stories they care about and content that will push them as young artists.
These types of articles are very interesting to me, as it demonstrates how narrow a lot of selections for high schools can be. The thing that a lot of these musicals have in common is that they have a large ensemble, as this allows for more students to participate in a single show. One thing that I find particularly interesting are the statistics at the top of this article. The average audience size and average number of performances are both much higher than I would expect. I would honestly expect closer to five shows and a five hundred person audience per show. One thing that’s also interesting to me is how all of these shows are either traditional musicals (Little Shop, Annie) or they are disney based (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast). I really wish that there would be more diversity in high school show selection in general.
There were really no surprises on this list, although I personally saw the majority of these shows being performed in middle schools. I think a main challenge schools run into is casting size. In an educational environment picking a show that gives opportunities to many students was a priority. My high school had an interesting system because there was one 40-50 person musical chosen by the staff and one 14 ish person musical chosen and directed by 2 students a year. Because of this we got to experience a wide variety of shows especially in the smaller shows that are challenging at a school needing to have a wider range of opportunities in their musicals. For instance Assassins and Fly by Night. Even in plays we had a mix of staff and student chosen and directed. We got the opportunity to wrestle with more complicated material like Clybourne Park and Adventures of a Black Girl in search of God. I also got to see the effect first hand of choosing to present your students with more complicated material. In middle school we did Into the Woods then Seussical. When we were then challenged with Man of La Mancha as 13 year olds we were taught how to interact with an art piece in a more delicate manner giving us the opportunity to reflect and respect on our characters and the story at large.
This list was not very surprising. I’ve seen high schools around me at home do every single one of these shows in the past few years. My high school, in fact, did Little Shop of Horrors the year before I started there, and did The Wizard of Oz this year after I left. These shows all have a lot of featured parts, as well as large ensembles, so they work very well for high school companies, and the people they have to work with. Each musical on the list also has others on the list with similar ensemble costumes, meaning it would be easy to work with the stock that the school has if they had done many of these shows before. Each of these shows also doesn’t have any overly hard parts and are appropriate for younger audiences (and high school principals who have to approve the shows). Overall, this is a great list for high schools to reference.
Due to the fact that at this point in my career I've spent more time in high school theater than professional theatre, this article was pretty interesting to me. When looking through this list, and this may sound pretentious, but all of these are middle school or elementary musicals for me rather than high school ones. It may be that these are based off a typical conservative (oftentimes religious) high school theater, and I grew up doing shows like Guys and Dolls and A Chorus Line in high school. The only couple of shows that I could really see in a high school setting is Into the Woods, Cinderella, and Little Shop of Horrors other than that, I'd rather not see a 17 year old Annie onstage. I think that there is more merit in high schools doing more modern shows like Legally Blonde and In the Heights because it deals with more than just fairytales, it really gives high school performers the opportunity to indulge in theater that is still being produced outside of a high school setting.
Many of these titles struck a reminiscent chord with me. I feel lucky to have gone to a school that had a director who saw our potential in shows with more mature and intellectual content. That being said, this pattern of recurring productions always intrigues me. The constraints a high school program must fill are often different and more forgiving than most other production groups, meaning they looks for casts with large numbers, a “fun” show, something recognizable, age-appropriate content, etc. I find the age-appropriate piece the most troubling. It is one of those things that naturally happens in that awkward high school spot where students are often more grown than adults give them credit for, so many of them end up in Seussical, which is just disappointing. I understand that some shows might be a little bit too heavy, but allowing students to stretch themselves and embrace the discomfort that meaningful theatre can hold is an opportunity that I believe is a much more valuable experience than being munchkin number 7 in The Wizard of Oz. I also think there is value in finding balance in your season. Maybe including the big, recognizable musical as well as the heavier piece can give students a greater experience. Also, including playwrights of underrepresented groups and highlighting that early in a
Of the ten shows listed, I have worked on maybe five of them, but only two at my high school, which was unexpected, I thought at most of the shows we had done would be on the list. I think the shows on this list have a few things in common. They are generally geared more towards younger audiences, often even younger than high school. This brings in the neighborhood children and their parents and sells a lot of tickets, because in all honesty, the target audience of high school theater is not usually high school students. These productions also have large ensembles, often with interesting and distinct secondary and tertiary characters which gives more students a “chance to shine” as my high school director would always say, “everyone should have their moment.” The shows on this list definitely give the ensemble a lot to work with, especially Shrek, Beauty and the Beast, and Suessical to name a few. I would love to see high schoolers tackling more challenging and interesting ideas for their age rather than playing down to a younger audience, but c’est la vie I suppose.
Although there weren’t really any surprises on the list, I do think reading this brought up a couple thoughts about the high school musical selection process. One reason these shows are performed so often is the possibility for large choruses, making casting a lot more flexible than smaller shows. My high school did The Addams Family last year and one benefit of that was that there was a specified group of leads but an unspecified number of chorus members- going to a 4000-person high school, we usually ended up with a cast of 50-70 and trying to find shows that could accommodate that limits the choices severely. I also noted that all the shows on the list are instantly recognizable and could bring in people from the community who know and like the show as opposed to an audience of just parents, as well as potentially getting the rest of the student body motivated to attend.
Post a Comment