Once upon a time, long ago – say 2005 – before a cultural monster from the Disney Channel changed everything, the words “high school musical” conjured delight in the hearts of camera-popping parents and a panicked scramble for excuses among anyone without children. The distaste affected many young people themselves.
Even Disney’s 2006 tweenager film High School Musical recognized that. In that rough remake of a Shakespeare play, the hoop-shooting star Romeo, named Troy, has a friend Chad, who tries to dissuade him from auditioning for the musical: “Man, that music isn’t hip-hop, okay, or rock, or anything essential to culture. It’s show music. It’s all costumes and makeup....Oh, dude, it’s frightening.”
But the once frighteningly amateur high school musical has gained a new sense of itself. (In Disney’s case, it has also gained hundreds of millions of dollars in the form of a concert tour, a Broadway show tour, bestselling albums, two film sequels with a third reportedly in the works, screaming sixth-grade fans everywhere, and multiplying Facebook tribute pages.) These days, the high school musical is an aesthetic destination – particularly on Martha’s Vineyard, where it has had a loyal community following for decades.
Last fall, nobody at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School seemed to have heeded any Chad-like warnings before auditions for the annual musical. “We realized we had more than a small number [of students] that had to be featured,” says drama teacher Kate Murray, of Chilmark. “Not just cast, but featured. We don’t pre-cast, but we knew who was likely to audition, and then there are always some surprises – kids who never auditioned before or who have really taken off since the previous year in unexpected ways.”
Kate selected A Chorus Line, a 1970s Broadway song-and-dance sensation about a group of aspiring Broadway dancers auditioning for a show. Turnout for A Chorus Line auditions was big.
And there were indeed surprises. Star football player Andrew Larsen, of Chilmark, auditioned for the first time, and scored the role of Zach, the director auditioning dancers for the chorus line. Taylor Rasmussen, a freshman from Vineyard Haven, landed Paul, perhaps the most difficult role in the show, with the longest monologue – which he nailed. Teenage girls belted out demanding parts requiring big female voices. Even the chorus roles were played with heart, perhaps inspired by the story line of the show itself. Almost seventy students were in the production, out of eight hundred in the school.
On opening night, the Performing Arts Center at the high school was packed – and not just with parents. So enraptured were some members of the audience they sent effusive letters of praise to the newspapers; teenagers added their raves, naturally, on the newspapers’ website feedback pages.
This remarkable success – this wealth of young talent, the burgeoning audience, even the director, Kate Murray herself – results from a long fertilization of the creative community on Martha’s Vineyard.
As a three-year-old growing up on the Island, Kate ran around backstage while her mother, the late Virginia Poole, worked with the longtime and legendary high school drama teacher Duncan Ross, now retired. When Kate was a little older, she also connected with Lee Fierro, the equally admired Vineyard Haven actress, theater director, and longtime associate artistic director and, for the last ten years, artistic director of Island Theatre Workshop and its Children’s Theatre program (now based at the Sailing Camp Park in Oak Bluffs). Lee wrote a song specifically for young Kate, when she was attending the original summer drama camp that has, in its forty years on the Island, spawned so many others.
“It’s an artist-rich community,” sums up Donna Swift, of Edgartown, who teaches drama in Island elementary schools, and leads improvisation troupes and summer camps through Troubled Shores, a not-for-profit theater program (and who also worked at ITW’s Children’s Theatre). “One of my graduates is now studying in performing arts at Emerson College – she didn’t realize how many performing opportunities she got here, compared to students in other places.”
The Vineyard theater scene offers young people cultural rights unheard of in many communities: from creative drama classes Island actress Phyllis Vecchia, of Vineyard Haven, leads for children as young as four through her nonprofit Creative Drama program, to the unique Fourth Grade Theatre Project at the Vineyard Playhouse, an annual program where Vineyard youngsters produce and have the opportunity to perform in their own original stage shows; from middle school shows at each Island elementary school, to the Playhouse’s Christmas show, to myriad performance camps running simultaneously each summer; from a professional teen improv troupe to award-winning, originally scripted high school drama pieces and eclectic choices (including teenagers performing Sam Shepard one-acts in the round).
“It starts with kindergarten,” says Donna, who loves to watch the little ones acting out famous last lines – “the dying lines, usually, they love doing the fake deaths.” Reveling in the heightened emotion, they don’t even know it’s Shakespeare they are doing. Few are the drama teachers like Donna whose memories of great Desdemonas include a five-year-old. “Oh, they especially love [Shakespeare’s] insults; they eat it up.”
Lee Fierro notes that for some it begins even earlier. “I love what Phyllis Vecchia does, toting her boxes of costumes around and getting kids’ imaginations going crazy.”
Donna Swift marvels that “by the time some of these kids are in the seventh or eighth grade, they’ve got so much experience I can start casting them against type.” She continues, “They’re not always the ingénue or the villain, they’re really learning the meaning of acting, stretching and exploring creatively.”
The Vineyard’s stage successes are proving themselves far beyond the annual high school musical.
Take the IMPers. Last year a group of Island teenagers who call themselves the IMPers became only the second high school improvisational comedy troupe ever to score an invitation to the prestigious Chicago Improv Festival. Performing alongside college and professional troupes, for the artistic director of the festival, and for other improv stars from such stages as Second City LA, the IMPers shone.
Little wonder these “kids” can draw crowds to their regular summer improv performances – Wednesday nights at the Grange Hall in West Tisbury – competing for an audience against all sorts of other pursuits tourists might choose. “There is so much support from Islanders when we are creative in the winter,” says IMPer graduate Ashley Peters of Edgartown, “that in the summer we bump up the standards, and it takes more of a business – or professional – turn.”
Take the high school drama students who made it to the finals in the Massachusetts High School Drama Guild competition in Boston, performing Boxes, an original work conceived by the students and completed by Kate Murray. It was written and performed in iambic pentameter and its subject matter was the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. This year, Kate and her drama students wrote a mystery in the style of a classic British farce for the competition.
Take sixteen-year-old Katie Ann Mayhew, a regular singer and actor on the Vineyard stage, who sang with the Boston Pops on July 3 and 4 at the Charles River Esplanade as the winner of the orchestra’s statewide singing contest.
Or take Beanstalk! The Musical! This year, the major play publisher Baker’s Plays, a division of Samuel French, accepted Beanstalk! for its catalogue for schools and professional companies. It was written by IMP director Donna Swift and Ross Mihalko, of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Donna’s regular collaborator (whom she met during one of his stays on the Vineyard), with music by Tisbury’s Linda Berg, who now heads Island Theatre Workshop’s Children’s Theatre summer camps, where Beanstalk! was first produced.
“Theatre is now one of the things on the Island,” says Lee Fierro, marveling at the changes since she came to Children’s Theatre in 1974 to work with the late Mary Payne, a tiny, dynamic mother who began the program so her kids would have something to do.
Kate Murray agrees: “I feel like we have a very creative, cultured environment even though we are so isolated. Parents here introduce their children to so many things, partly because we are often so disconnected. Our strength comes from the need to express ourselves as a community – at any age – so this program has grown and developed, from the natural talent of kids who have creative families that come here for that reason, from the exposure parents here give their kids, and sometimes from the need just to find something to do.”
In theater, kids here find more than just a little stage experience. “We aim higher, the kids aim higher,” says Donna, who works hand in glove with Kate to develop drama students as they progress. The two young directors both deliberately choose challenging material. With A Chorus Line, adult material that addresses, among other things, homosexuality, Kate admits to some surgical censoring. “But not too much. Too much and you take away from the drama,” she says, adding that the musical comes with a community warning equivalent to PG-13.
“‘Children’s theater’ is theater for children,” explains Kate, who has taught drama to every age from preschool to university. “These are teenagers, who are in between that and adulthood – some are adults, some are even living on their own. They’re saying, ‘Let me be a grown-up!’ So though we are not a professional company, we are teaching them what it’s like to be in a professional company.”
Even the younger children’s show Beanstalk! has dark edges that make it a more interesting, and challenging, piece. The giant’s wife sings that her husband is “tall, dark, handsome...sweet. Said he wanted children, but he wanted them to eat!” Linda Berg says this too is a long Island tradition: “Maybe it’s better sometimes not to be overly affected by what everyone else does. Mary Payne refused to write little kiddie shows. She loved language, and kids grow up appreciating the nuance.”
“There’s so much bad material out there for kids,” Donna laments. “People think kids are not as smart as they are. They don’t give kids enough credit.” Tongue in cheek it may be, but Swift and Mihalko’s material makes a statement and kids get it. Donna takes the same approach with her young performers: “I tell them, ‘I don’t treat you like kids; I treat you like actors.’”
Linda Berg describes her motivation in making Beanstalk! as “anti-Barney” – citing the purple dinosaur so many parents loathe. She points to Philip Pullman, who wrote The Golden Compass, among other books, who has said, “We need to ensure that children are not forced to waste their time on barren rubbish.” With the summer musicals Children’s Theatre performs every two weeks on Fridays at Sailing Camp Park, she knows the criticisms by the smallest folks in the audience can be every bit as harsh as the grown-ups: “Children have no patience for vague lyrics banging on about feelings about love – they fidget through a song like that.”
Linda says there may be a stigma about “theater for children” elsewhere, but many Island productions have rightly earned a reputation for being intelligent and well acted. “Which is a pretty remarkable phenomenon for a place this size,” she adds.
Which is why Lee Fierro is so upset about the possibilities of drama programs at the high school being curtailed or positions being cut. “Many people are upset. Some are not. Some think it’s not as important as sports, which also is important.
“But I hope we have gone as far as we have to with this No Child Left Behind scoring match. Because what we are leaving behind is the children – the irony! – their imaginations, their selves,” sighs Lee, sitting at a table at the Black Dog, her face familiar to anyone who watched Jaws as the mother of Alex Kintner, who took on Chief Brody after her son was taken by the shark.
“But theater is the most wonderful, wonderful device to make the larger world, and the present world, real to kids,” she says. “That’s what M.J. [Bruder Munafo, producer and artistic director at the Vineyard Playhouse] is doing with her Summer Stars program [the drama camp for kids]. That’s what teachers could be doing with social studies classes, English, science, mathematics....They can use their bodies and act out the properties of twelve: They can make two groups of six, or four groups of three, or a group of eight and a group of four.
“Or history, if they study Egypt, they can write about it, paint something, make a time line, then do a play, so they remember it. Kids remember their performances,” Lee adds, even though for her the crucial experience is to guide them through the process, not focus on the “product,” or performance.
Donna Swift agrees that standardized tests make it hard for schools to incorporate drama as they might. “The MCAS [standardized state exams] makes it more difficult,” she says. “Although we have it better here. But this community at large thinks a little more out of the box – it’s a little more open to alternative ways of learning.”
Sitting in the soaring backstage green room of the Performing Arts Center that also serves as her office, Kate Murray tries to put on a brave face. Scheduling problems have led to falling enrollment in the classes (when drama is at the same time as advanced placement history, students have to consider the judgment of those college admissions officers), so the music and drama departments are where administrators, facing budget shortfalls, are looking to make cuts.
Posters from decades of shows line the mirror behind Kate. Five tattered sofas used as props circle the room, and ladders lead to boxes upon boxes of props and costumes stored above overflowing production closets. All attest to the students long aged since their moments on stage. A fundraising group on the Island, BravEncore, was begun in 2007 by parents whose children have graduated from high school. Yet they have spearheaded an ongoing campaign, raising concerns at town meetings as well as thousands of dollars for the drama program.
Meanwhile, Kate keeps talking about the kids, and who’ll audition for next year’s musical. There are some special singers, dancers, actors – to her, they are stars. “The gift of the job is there are so many of those.”
