photographs courtesy of the orpheum theatre
If your memories of high-school theater Our Town it’s probably time to update your perception. Budgets may be large or small depending on a particular school’s means and priorities but, accounting for the disparities, there’s work being done at the high-school level in Memphis that, in terms of raw talent and creativity, could give our established professional and community playhouses a run for their money.
Nowhere is this transformation more evident than at The Orpheum Theatre’s annual High School Musical Theatre Awards, which just completed its ninth season of celebrating excellence and creating opportunity for young performers and technicians. The HSMTA show is no longer on its way to becoming a venerated Memphis institution; it has arrived.
My first impression of the 2017-18 High School Musical Theatre Awards, held at The Orpheum May 24th, was straightforward: These kids are good and came ready and able to put on a show. Color-enhanced lights came up, wrapping an enormous chorus of dancing teenagers in their purple glow. The orchestra played a funky rhythm. The near-capacity audience erupted in shrill cheers and thunderous applause as the young voices blended and swelled in unison: “They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway. They say there’s always magic in the air …”
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photographs courtesy of the orpheum theatre
he young men and women on stage represented 29 high school theater programs from across west Tennessee, north Mississippi, and northeastern Arkansas. Before the night was over, more than 300 of them would sing, dance, and collect awards for excellence underneath spotlights that have seen their share of Broadway stars, stalwarts, and gypsy dancers.
Sherry Phillians is an educator who heads up the theater program for Wynne High School in Wynne, Arkansas. This year her students won the HSMTA’s People’s Choice award for a production of The Wizard of Oz. Phillians describes her experience with the awards as overwhelmingly positive and compares winning any category at the HSMTAs to the school football team winning a big conference game.
“I don’t know what it means to the Memphis community, because there are so many schools in Memphis,” Phillians explains. “But, in our small rural town, it’s a big deal when your show is being seen by judges for the High School Musical Theater Awards sponsored by the Orpheum Theater.”
Like many educators, administrators, judges, and program alumni surveyed for this story, Phillians compares the friendly if intense competition to an athletic event for students who are differently — or variously — inclined.
The Ostranders
The 2017-18 High School Musical Theatre Awards are in the books but award season in Memphis isn’t over yet. The Ostrander Awards are still on the horizon. Named for beloved community performer Jim Ostrander, and recognizing excellence in Memphis’ community, professional, college, and university theater, the Ostranders are held each year in August at The Orpheum.
In addition to honoring the top shows of the past season, the Ostranders are also an opportunity to celebrate annual recipients of the Eugart Yerian Lifetime Achievement Award, named for director, producer, and motorless-flight enthusiast Eugart Yerian. This year’s honoree is Tony Isbell, a veteran actor and director and co-founder of Memphis’ Quark Theatre, dedicated to producing “small, essential” work. Isbell most recently directed Death of a Streetcar Named Virginia Woolf at Circuit Playhouse.
The 2017-18 Ostrander awards will be held Sunday, August 26th at The Orpheum Theatre. Cocktails are at 6 p.m. The awards presentation begins at 7 p.m.
The young men and women on stage represented 29 high school theater programs from across west Tennessee, north Mississippi, and northeastern Arkansas.
Each year around 40 of Wynne High’s approximately 800 students participate in the school’s musical theater program. Sold-out shows play to 900 people a night. “It’s a big deal for us,” Phillians says. “And Lindsay Krosnes
Krosnes is The Orpheum’s director of education and community programs, who says, “This program is my heart, and I love it.” She joined the HSMTA team in its second year and set out with the intention “to make it the Super Bowl of high school theater” for participating departments.
While she has largely achieved that goal, Krosnes is also somewhat bothered by the result.
“I hate that it’s an awards program,” she says. “Is it an amazing thing in our community? Yes it is. I just hate the fact that we have to present awards. But that’s just the nature of it. Especially in the South, that’s the nature of it.”
The HSMTAs aren’t just a Southern thing, however. The Orpheum’scompetition is one of 40 regional events feeding a national program run by the Broadway League. The top male and female performer from each region go to New York to perform a one-night show on Broadway and compete for a $10,000 scholarship.
photographs courtesy of the orpheum theatre
The HSMTAs were born during a time when The Orpheum, a longtime Broadway presenting house, was actively looking for ways to tap into its professional resources to nurture, recognize, and celebrate theater and the perennially threatened performing arts in Memphis area schools.
“I think we were approaching it like, ‘We have all these sports events, why can’t we have something these theater students can look forward to and strive for?’” Krosnes says.
Julie Reinbold, the sole theater-education teacher at Ridgeway High School, believes the awards have raised the bar for student performance. “It’s not like we need awards to do good work, but I think it has a lot to do with these students seeing the work other schools are doing, the fact that they’re being challenged
“Every school is at a different point in their journey,” Krosnes says, explaining how the award judges value thoughtfulness, creativity, and commitment over a school’s access or economic resources, taking into account the fact that different programs will always be funded and staffed at different levels. “There are schools that have had theater programs forever, and they are well-oiled machines,” she says. “Then you have some schools who thought six years ago, ‘Hey, let’s get our theater program going!’
“We’re passionate about nurturing students and my task is to remind the judges that they aren’t comparing schools to each other,” she continues. “They’re evaluating each school with the resources they have. What have they done with what they’ve been given? This is a community where we’re really about lifting people up.”
Sandy Kozik is no stranger to Memphis stages, although his appearances are few and far between. He’s a trained clown and gifted comic performer with a professional background in arts administration and education. He’s also a founding HSMTA judge who’s participated every year and, with few exceptions, tries to see every show produced by participating schools.
“I really don’t want to seeSeussical
“I always feel like I’m the ‘Man in Chair,’” Kozik says, referencing the narrator from a majestic meta-musical called The Drowsy Chaperone. Man in Chair is a curmudgeon whose general disregard for contemporary theater isn’t rooted in despair, but an unwavering faith in human imagination and good old-fashioned razzle-dazzle.
“I’m not a musical theater actor per se. But I’ve been going to shows since I was 7 years old, and my mother would take me to see actors like Barry Fuller and Barbara Cason perform at the old Front Street Theater,” Kozik says. “So being a judge is like a dream job. Especially because you get to see these kids grow so much through the years.
“I look at it from an arts-education value standpoint,” Kozik continues, describing his approach to the work. “When I watch a show, I ask if the staff or teachers really made connections to whatever piece they’re doing. If it’s Grease you’d think they may have done some kind of schooling about life in America in the 1950s. Or the 1920s, if they’re doing Thoroughly Modern Millie.”
While a show’s size can be impressive, Kozik doesn’t think that matters very much.
“There are two kinds of schools,” he explains. “First, there are the schools where they’ve always had a theater department and they’ve always done a piece of musical theater, and everybody wants to be in it, so they cast as many people as possible and none of them have anything to do except for standing in a row. And half of them don’t really want to be there, but there are, like, five that are really into it and you can spot those five.”
The other kind, he says, make amazing art out of old refrigerator boxes. “And at the end of the day all these shows build community,” Kozik concludes. “They bring people from church or from their homes on Sunday afternoon to see this high school musical. A lot of whom might never have gone to the theater otherwise.”
Community-building is a happy by-product and something Krosnes hadn’t counted on. “We have to put on a professional-quality show in a week’s time, so the rehearsal process is intense,” Krosnes explains. “Over the course of that week, 300 students who might not have met each other otherwise come together, so you have kids from White Station and Central High meeting kids from Corinth, Mississippi, and Wynne, Arkansas. So a network forms out of this program and all these kids stay in touch. It’s something we never anticipated, but it has been the greatest development, and something I am very happy about.”
“We try to take a group to see at least one of the other school’s shows every year now, and those are the times where I think our students grow the most,” Phillians says. “It helps some see that while they might think they’re really good, there are other really good actors and singers out there. It gives them a standard. And sometimes it’s the other way around, and they’re critical so you ask what they had or didn’t have to work with or, ‘What was the director’s vision?’”
“The thing I love is that even though it’s a competition the kids make friends from other schools,” Reinbold from Ridgeway says, describing one way the HSMTAs have changed the community. “They are very supportive of each other,” she says. “They go see each other’s shows.”
Another fortuitous and unforeseen result of this new connectivity is the fact that every year more and more alumni contact Krosnes, and ask how they can help make the awards show better. In addition to presenters and volunteers, this year’s event was stage managed, assistant stage managed, and choreographed by HSMTA alumni.
“I have this dream where someday alumni are running the whole thing,” Krosnes says.
Spencer Germany tells a familiar story. Germany’s one of the alumni who’s come back to The Orpheum to participate as an awards presenter. Today he’s a rising sophomore music-education major at Middle Tennessee State University. He started out life as a jock. “I played football all through middle school and even the first few years of high school,” he says. Things started changing for Germany when, as a freshman, he was cast in the musical comedy She Loves Me.
The CBHS graduate knew right away that he’d found the place where he was most comfortable. “I started doing honors choirs where music education happened right in front of me,” he says. “It made me realize that a career in music was the only thing in the world for me.”
photographs courtesy of the orpheum theatre
While rehearsing the opening and closing numbers with the High School Musical Theatre Awards’ chorus, Germany had an opportunity to watch all the leading-actor nominees work through their medley with the music director.
“The second I saw that, I knew I wanted to be on stage in that medley,” he says. “I didn’t care if I won or not, I just wanted to sing at that capacity and to tell my story with seven other characters that wouldn’t normally be on stage together.”
Germany went to work, absorbing soundtracks and learning everything he could about musical theater. The very next year he got his wish, winning the local competition and going on to New York to perform at the Minskoff Theatre and compete in the Broadway League’s Jimmy Awards, named for Broadway theater owner and producer Jimmy Nederlander.
The experience of staging an extravaganza like the High School Musical Theatre Awards in only a week gives students a glimpse of the professional experience. Ridgeway graduate Breyannah Tillman makes it plain that the grueling experience was nothing compared to preparing for the Jimmy Awards in New York.
“I had just enough time to drop my bags and change into my workout clothes before I had to be in rehearsal,” Tillman says of a process that only got more intense when she learned she’d finished third and would be performing a solo rendition of “Lot’s Wife/Salty Teardrops” from the musical drama Caroline or Change.
“The best part was I got to come up out of the floor,” Tillman says, describing her dramatic entrance on a lift. “And the Minskoff is full and everybody bursts into applause.”
Tillman has continued to pursue a life in show business, working primarily with recording artists as a supporting vocalist. Currently, she stars in the pivotal role of Effie in Dreamgirls at Playhouse on the Square through July 15th.
Although it is part of a national program, Memphis’ HSMTAs are unique. “Nobody else in the country serves three states,” Krosnessays. “I’m very happy about what we’re doing, and I think The Orpheum is too.”
