Backstage musical
Students are class acts when Parkview High School turns into High School Musical
By Kyle Brazzel
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
LITTLE ROCK — It was Lauren Fletcher’s last chance for a leading role.
It was J.C. Connor’s turn to be in charge.
Finally, Matt Martin could show he had moves other than sacking groceries.
And Mrs. Howell would find a way to get a dog on stage, even if she had to train one to tap dance.
Last Thursday, the curtain opened on the spring musical put on by Little Rock’s Parkview High School.
Back at the beginning of the year, when the time came to choose its spring production, the performing-arts magnet school thought big. Disney big. A story so iconic it doesn’t have a title as much as a label.
With High School Musical, a Disney Channel made-for-TV movie so popular and commercially successful it was licensed for the school stage in whiplash time, you know from the name on the marquee what you are going to get.
What you are going to get: The story of a pretty teenage girl named Gabriella who believes all she can be is a math whiz, and of a square-jawed teenage boy named Troy who believes all he can be is a jock, and how they figure out they can be those things and also sing in their school’s big musical, which in turn inspires several other stock high-school characters to add nuance to their identities.
As William Shakespeare understood, the play is the thing. (Shakespeare is relevant because, well, he is always relevant, but also because Romeo & Juliet forms the basis of High School Musical’s showwithin-a-show, only reimagined as a happily ending musical in which the lovers survive and retire to Albuquerque, N.M.)
But for teenagers, even at Parkview High and its Broadway-caliber theater arts program, the play has a way of being the thing and also not the thing.
Behind the scenes of so large a teenage production, in cramped quarters and in shadow, plays a tale complete with its own heroes, divas and comic relief. One with moments when all seems lost and when anything seems possible. Where coming-of-age drama meets it’s-all-coming-together crescendo, for a result so emotionally rich, so thrilling in the unslowable fleet of its limited run, that a lucky audience to the saga might never want the curtain to open. Because when the curtain opens a new story will start, but another one is already over.
This is that story.
At the beginning of February, Debbie Howell and Christopher Crane of the Parkview theater department supervised auditions for High School Musical.
Mrs. Howell, who would direct the show’s first act, had cast exactly one actor. Elphaba, a Jack Russell terrier named for the green-skinned witch in the hit Broadway musical Wicked and belonging to Mr. Crane, would play a yet-to-bedetermined role. Mrs. Howell loved dogs. No show was complete without a dog, even if the playwright had imagined his script complete without one.
Now Mrs. Howell and Mr.Crane sat in the auditorium and considered students for the roles that were actually on the page.
Casting the male lead was relatively easy. Sam Clark, a junior whose deep bass puts him in league with the state’s best high-school singers, was not only musically gifted but also handsome, charismatic and nimble enough to be believable as a star athlete whose confidence turns the ship of an entire school’s social strictures.
Getting cast as a lead was nothing new for Sam: When he showed up at Parkview his freshman year, he won the part of Seymour in Little Shop of Horrors.
But if Lauren Fletcher was ever going to get a lead, it was now or never. An oliveskinned, smoky-voiced beauty, Lauren planned a career in pharmacy for after college, but for now she set her sights on the role of Gabriella. In Little Shop, Lauren had played a supporting nurse role to Sam. Sheperformed in the chorus for Pippin. Graduation would soon take her out of high-schoolmusical contention forever.
But it wasn’t an emptying hourglass that made Mrs. Howell and Mr. Crane ultimately settle on Fletcher for the show’s female lead. Her singing voice managed to combine sweetness and sophistication, and years of dance training had given her the carriage to project Gabriella’s winning sense of self-possession. Lauren’s talent, not her timeline, won her her first leading role.
In auditioning for the role of Chad, Troy’s best friend and a beloved figure from the movie, Matt Martin didn’t have time as his enemy, but he sensed no less urgency in landing a part that would showcase his personal evolution.
He had recently started going to the gym and had dropped 16 pounds. And he hardly let anyone pass by him without a hug or a handshake; he knew if he got a part he could be proud of, his coworkers at the grocery store would come to watch him redirect the enthusiasm he usually displayed for gingerly but cheerfully packing eggs and bananas.
To keep everybody corralled backstage, Howell and Crane turned to J.C. Connor to be one of the show’s two stage managers. J.C., an order-keeping major on the school’s drum corps, was the kind of guy who believed if you wanted something done right, you do it yourself.
In a way, High School Musical had to audition for J.C. instead of the other way around; when the show was announced as the spring musical, J.C. staged a protest to change it. Dracula, last year’s musical, was more his preference - dark and brooding - where High School Musical builds to a rousing, hand-clapping, foot-stomping romp of a finale called “We’re All in This Together.”
But in the end, his call of duty got the better of him, andhe decided if his school had to do Disney’s High School Musical, it might as well be a well-oiled, technically flawless version of it.
So J.C. got to work overseeing construction of the facade of a high school, down to installing the wiring on wall sconces so they’d really light up.
Sam began working on his basketball layups for the show’s game scenes and on his falsetto for the boyish arrangements on Troy’s solos.
Lauren said goodbye to her social life. She told her friends to go ahead and plan her senior prom night for her and just tell her what she owed for her share of the cost.
Matt said goodbye to the gym and cut back his hours at the grocery store.
Outside, winter became spring, which turned back to winter, then resettled again on spring.
Throughout March and the beginning of April, the kids remained acquainted with after-school daylight. Rehearsals ended at 7 p.m. The cast would reconvene an hour later at a breakfast-all-day joint and remain in character. (Their characters were, after all, theatrically inclined high-school students.)
In the second week of April, that changed. The full orchestra began attending practices.
Cast members had to quadruple their singing power to be heard. Two hours a night were added on to practice. Dusk became a distant memory. Pancake suppers became a luxury.
“We send them home tired,” said Mrs. Howell.
At 9 p.m., at the beginning of the last rehearsal week without an actual show in it,Mrs. Howell sent them home, tired.
Suddenly, before anyone knew it, it was a week until opening night.
To eke more time from his crowded days, J.C. had taken to shoving his thatch of black curls underneath a toboggan cap. He wore a walkie-talkie whose mouthpiece was wired to his shoulder, like a secret agent or a member of Secret Service.
He was getting used to delegating: That afternoon he’d gotten to deputize an assistant to scoop up after Elphaba, whose High School Musical role had become that of a lap dog to the show’s wacky theater-teacher character, when the puppy had a messy backstage accident.
Something J.C. had picked up: The unfortunate role of being the “Sssssh” guy. The cast of High School Musical loved to whisper. Stage-whispers or secret-whispers, they didn’t care which.
During Friday night’s marathon rehearsal, Matt was already dreading the 9 a.m. start of his Saturday morning shift at the grocery store. Victoria VanPelt, who would be playing a brainy love interest for Matt’s jock character, was already dreading her restauranthostessing shift for Saturday night.
Matt marveled at their packed schedules. “Hard-working people!” he exclaimed.
“Up here all the time, real jobs on the weekends.” Switching gears, he pulled Victoria into a high-kick formation. The show’s choreography didn’t call for it; the duo high-kicked mostly because they could.
When a dinner-related text message arrived from her mother, Victoria pulled away from the kicking to respond.
“How rude!” said Matt, suddenly kicking solo.
“Sssshhh!” said J.C.
“God, I want this day to be over,” sighed a dancer from the chorus.
“Sssssh!” said J.C.
“I don’t,” said Brandon Nichols, ignoring him.
“Why not?”
“Because I love rehearsals,” Brandon replied.
This did not surprise Giahna Glasco, cast as Sharpay, the show’s literal drama queen. Brandon was playing Ryan, her brother and comrade-in-scenery-chewing. The characters live for high-school-musical theater. In real life, same thing: Brandon, 15, planned to enroll in New York University and pursue a Broadway career.
He’d already been in several shows at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre.
“They typecast, obviously, but it works,” Giahna said. “It’s extremely exaggerated, and I wouldn’t even say extremely.
It’s exaggerated, but no one is acting.”
Thunder had been rumbling overhead all night, competing with the show’s sound cues.
Even from within the insulation of backstage, the students could sense the theater being lashed from outside by wind and rain.
Mrs. Howell halted rehearsal to make an announcement. She instructed the cast that if things got really dire, they should seek shelter in the dressing rooms, but away from mirrors.
Matt’s eyes grew wide in disbelief: “She is prepping us for a freaking tornado.”
Not even J.C. could shush away the furious clap of thunder that seemed to confirm Matt’s fears.
And the threat of a freaking tornado wasn’t even the worst catastrophe that lay in the path of High School Musical.
Everyone came back from their two days off more focused, but also more prone to frustration.
J.C. tired of hauling furniture on and off stage for a change in scene that the performers weren’t getting quite right.
“God! Actors! Ugh!” he grumbled, to no one in particular.
Mr. Crane gathered everyone for a state of the union speech. He tried to strike a balance between his swelling pride and his growing sense the production had more glitches than time to fix them.
Some of Sam’s notes were still just out of reach. Sometimes the three reinforcement singers stationed in the orchestra pit sounded as if they were the only people singing.
“I don’t want this to go to your heads, but you are on the verge of having a really nice show,” he began. “But there is an extreme lack of focus right now. Friday night was absolutely wretched. You are here for one thing. That is to put an awesome production together.”
Mrs. Howell promised that for the next two nights, they would bore straight through the show. No do-overs.
“Something awful will have to happen for us to stop,” she said.
Something awful was about to.
The best day for the worst possible thing to happen to a show is the day before opening, when there is still time to correct course.
At least when the worst possible thing happened to High School Musical, it had the decency to happen on Wednesday, about 24 hours before the show’s opening. And at least very few kids were in the theater at the time.
The talent in the Parkview High School auditorium isstate of the art. The wiring is not. That morning, when Mr. Crane flipped some electrical switches, instead of LIGHTS!
and ACTION!, it was SPARKS!
and SMOKE! Really, what it was, was ...
... FIRE!
The theater was cleared.
Electricians were summoned.
Sets were partially dismantled to make room for bulky rewiring equipment. Opening day felt unreachable and yet still inevitable. Would even a repaired wiring system be able to power the stagelights and sound equipment?
Because of the fanatical following of High School Musical the movie and High School Musical the soundtrack CD, High School Musical the Parkview play had gotten more attention than any the school had ever staged. Cast members had been interviewed on the radio. Television news crews had filmed rehearsals. Capacity crowds were expected foreach performance. The show, having to go on, would.
With less than 12 hours to their first show, the cast members were so discombobulated after dress rehearsal they no longer trusted even their facial-expression instincts. A chorus girl raised her hand to ask if, during a big number involving the entire cast, “Can we smile?”
“Can you smile?” Mrs. Howell repeated. “How about please will you smile?” Then she invoked the show that, before this one, had once been the school’s biggest, most complicated production. “This ain’t Les Miz. It’s a happy show. You should be cheesin’ it big time.
A smile is like a yawn. It’s energy. It’s contagious.”
Mrs. Howell warned her actors that the followingmorning’s student audience might be their harshest, but that breaking character to acknowledge a heckler would essentially be surrendering the show they’d worked months to perfect.
“This is your show,” she stressed. “You have to make a decision. Do you want to give away the show, or do you want to keep it?”
Even if High School Musical lived up to expectations and audiences sat rapt and too mesmerized to heckle, or even if it just had the juice to run its stagelights, some of the students worried that Parkview might never again be able to mount a show of its magnitude.
A rumor was going around the cast that the district was considering cutting the magnet-school funding that gave its school its theater-arts edge.
In reality, things aren’t anywhere near that dramatic, but what’s high school without a good decline-of-an-empirestyle wallow? Even if Parkview could, in successive years, recreate the magic it’d bring in the coming days to High School Musical, it wouldn’t be with these kids, in this configuration.
When a new story starts, another story is over.
So we leave Lauren and Sam and Matt and J.C. and Mrs. Howell and, yes, even yippy little Elphaba standing there waiting in the wings, in the hope that if the curtain doesn’t open, the story of them will always be a story in which Lauren is the girl who became a star in the nick of time, and Matt is the boy who traded in his grocery apron for the spotlight, and J.C. becomes a leader by making the absolute best of a show he didn’t even like.
Not that there’s anything wrong or anticlimactic with what happened next, which was that the lights stayed on and the only sparks were between characters who were supposed to spark, and Lauren sang in such a way that made everybody forget there’d ever been a movie version of High School Musical, then downed a quick hot dog at the wrap party and rushed home early to finish her physics homework.
Or with the fact that, after the last show, Matt slapped his forehead in despair, cried “Life is over!” and even meant it, at least for the next few hours.
Or that once the theater went dark, J.C. went from being the guy in charge to being the guy who suddenly had to face the wisdom-teeth extraction he had, in his regimented way, scheduled for immediately after the show’s run.
With swollen cheeks and a jaw full of cotton, he wouldn’t be shushing anybody for a while.
When Mrs. Howell told them this is your show, what she had meant was the show that happened between the opening and closing curtain, when Troy met Gabriella and Sharpay and Ryan schemed to keep them apart and Chad and Taylor schemed to reunite them and everybody sang “We’re All in This Together” with a radiance that would have reduced Count Dracula to dust, right thereon the spot.
But the other show, the one that happened between auditions in February and opening curtain in April, was theirs, too. They didn’t have to make a decision about handing it over or keeping it for themselves. Because that show, nobody could take from them.
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