Somebody at Time Magazine is, apparently, a huge supporter of theatre in schools. Two recent articles of note:
Donna Letzter, the theater director at West Aurora High School in Aurora, Ill., has put on ambitious shows in the past like Cats and Les Misérables, and last year she even figured out a way to get a helicopter to lift off the stage for a production of Miss Saigon. But that was kid stuff compared her challenge this spring: staging the nation’s first licensed high school edition of Rent. Though the script had been pruned of most of the roughest material, this is still a musical in which most of the characters are either on drugs, suffering from AIDS, or having sex with members of their own sex. Yet a precautionary letter she sent to parents of the cast seemed to defuse any outrage (“You go girl!” one parent wrote back), and the local paper gave the production a thumbs-up even before it was staged early this month. “The newspaper said, thank goodness the kids are dealing with the issues,” says Letzter. “Somebody’s not shying away from topics that are difficult.”
Read more: Bye Bye, Birdie. Hello, Rent
Students have been learning about theater almost as soon as they’re learning the alphabet. The school’s theater study begins with fairy tales: what they’ve meant to families and artists alike. And the children get their lessons from the pros: almost 80 theater actors, directors, writers, musicians and other theater people have made guest appearances.
Read more: Grade School Impresarios
Thanks for visiting! If you want to be notified the next time we post something, sign up for email alerts or subscribe to the RSS feed.
Comments for this post are closed.
