What plays are they performing in high school these days?
January 10, 2022 5:28 PM Subscribe
Not a heavy question and a bit North-America-centric, but discussing our embarrassing theatre nerd high-school days with my wife and wondering if the same plays were still being done in high school as they were ~30 years ago.
This may lurch into chatfilter, but just wondering if those with insight into high school theatre have seen a shift in the canon in the last few decades. We recall a few chestnuts (Our Town), a lot of Tom Stoppard, Death of a Salesman, Kurt Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House, the Zoo Story... the overriding theme, though, was "16-year-olds-playing-middle-aged-men-with-malaise". Are high schools still... doing this, or is there more diversity and possibly 16-year-olds-playing-people-younger-than-40 type plays going up these days? What does the contemporary high school theatre dork perform?
This may lurch into chatfilter, but just wondering if those with insight into high school theatre have seen a shift in the canon in the last few decades. We recall a few chestnuts (Our Town), a lot of Tom Stoppard, Death of a Salesman, Kurt Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House, the Zoo Story... the overriding theme, though, was "16-year-olds-playing-middle-aged-men-with-malaise". Are high schools still... doing this, or is there more diversity and possibly 16-year-olds-playing-people-younger-than-40 type plays going up these days? What does the contemporary high school theatre dork perform?
Best answer: There are lists of the most popular that get published.
posted by jacquilynne at 5:42 PM on January 10, 2022 [6 favorites]
posted by jacquilynne at 5:42 PM on January 10, 2022 [6 favorites]
Australia here and the school I work at has definite MUSICALS focus (all singing all dancing)
The ones I remember:
Alice in Wonderland (very pantomime)
Robin Hood (ditto)
Hairspray (very well done)
Grease (before my time)
Happy Days (Fonz was miscast imho)
Legally Blonde
Matilda (most recent one, spread over two years for obvious reasons)
posted by freethefeet at 5:44 PM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
The ones I remember:
Alice in Wonderland (very pantomime)
Robin Hood (ditto)
Hairspray (very well done)
Grease (before my time)
Happy Days (Fonz was miscast imho)
Legally Blonde
Matilda (most recent one, spread over two years for obvious reasons)
posted by freethefeet at 5:44 PM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
My high school (2002-2006) with a strong theatre program alternated between plays and musicals each year (I think? Maybe it was fall and spring). We were in the tri-state area outside of NYC which causes some weird regulations about being able to perform current shows within a certain radius, so anything currently on broadway was automatically out of the running.
posted by raccoon409 at 6:14 PM on January 10, 2022
posted by raccoon409 at 6:14 PM on January 10, 2022
I was just watching a YouTube video the other day where the narrator briefly mentioned that Legally Blonde and Mean Girls are extremely popular in high schools these days.
posted by lunasol at 6:18 PM on January 10, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by lunasol at 6:18 PM on January 10, 2022 [2 favorites]
My high school years (do I have to admit when they were? Fine, ‘81-‘88) saw some more diversity in theater productions than the canon you surmise. Pippin, Tartuffe, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Anything Goes, Threepenny Opera, and a ton of student-written short plays. It was a specialized NYC school, which is probably the reason, but I just wanted to let you know that 40-year-old-men-feeling-malaise wasn’t entirely universal. (We did do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern though.)
posted by ejs at 6:28 PM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by ejs at 6:28 PM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
Best answer: My daughter acted in all but three of the shows put on at her school from 2012 (middle school) to 2018 (the year she graduated):
Nicholas Nickelby
Aladdin, Jr.
The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe
42nd Street
Shakespeare in Hollywood
25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
Nice Work If You Can Get It
Maelstrom (original play written by the school's theatre tech teacher/director)
The Importance of Being Earnest
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Treasure Island (with gender-blind casting)
You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown
The Pajama Game
Our Town
The 39 Steps
The Drowsy Chaperone
posted by cooker girl at 7:27 PM on January 10, 2022 [2 favorites]
Nicholas Nickelby
Aladdin, Jr.
The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe
42nd Street
Shakespeare in Hollywood
25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
Nice Work If You Can Get It
Maelstrom (original play written by the school's theatre tech teacher/director)
The Importance of Being Earnest
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Treasure Island (with gender-blind casting)
You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown
The Pajama Game
Our Town
The 39 Steps
The Drowsy Chaperone
posted by cooker girl at 7:27 PM on January 10, 2022 [2 favorites]
So I attended a (public, non-magnet) school with an exceptionally good theater program, and when I was in high school in the early 00s we did Wizard of Oz, Our Town, Peter Pan, Sound of Music, Arsenic & Old Lace etc. -- along with lots of Shakespeare, Les Mis, and the occasional outlier (Schoolhouse Rock Live -- SUPER fun tbh). Lately all kinds of cool things -- Newsies, Spongebob (!), Phantom, Sweeney Todd, Spamalot, Titanic, a bunch of Mary Zimmerman and more Shakespeare, and yes, some Disney. Not a lot of middle-aged malaise, then or now.
posted by goodbyewaffles at 7:34 PM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by goodbyewaffles at 7:34 PM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
The high school here in Davis, CA recently did a Heathers musical. I am so sad I missed it!
posted by sacrifix at 7:53 PM on January 10, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by sacrifix at 7:53 PM on January 10, 2022 [5 favorites]
My old roommate the Working Musician shepherded a local high school through a production of Rent around ten years ago.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 7:55 PM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 7:55 PM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
The best play I've seen in recent years, and I'm including Hamilton in this, was a high school production of Be More Chill. Performed by actual teenagers, it was much more interesting and moving than the official soundtrack's version.
posted by The corpse in the library at 8:05 PM on January 10, 2022
posted by The corpse in the library at 8:05 PM on January 10, 2022
My daughter’s high school did Clue in the fall and are doing Footloose this spring.
posted by ChristineSings at 8:30 PM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by ChristineSings at 8:30 PM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
The Wolves has been super popular especially in girls schools.
posted by stray at 8:31 PM on January 10, 2022
posted by stray at 8:31 PM on January 10, 2022
Last night I auditioned for Urinetown and the director was all, "It's done in youth theater a lot, I don't get that. I guess kids pee a lot." A new hit show is "Ranked," which was going around my region in the year or so before the pandemic. Like someone else mentioned, my high school did a straight play in the fall and a musical in the spring, so musicals get a lot of play. Seriously, you can probably find any version of any show done at a high school on YouTube these days.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:55 PM on January 10, 2022
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:55 PM on January 10, 2022
My high school daughter just finished playing one of the jurors in 12 Angry Men (or Jurors), so playing older is still a thing.
posted by freecellwizard at 9:55 PM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by freecellwizard at 9:55 PM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
Best answer: There's more effort, now, to produce plays that don't require the cast to pretend to be middle-aged white men. HS renditions of Death of a Salesman, in particular, have fallen off a cliff. Also declining here, or simply gone: the work of Neil Simon, Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Noel Coward. (Some of this feels like a loss; some of it is just culture marching on. Schools are also starting to confront the fact that monoculturally white plays, regardless of how they're cast, are hostile to many students.)
Kids will always "play up" though, due to the dearth of quality drama meant to be performed by teens. And like, more high schoolers want to pretend to be adults than they want to be in Seussical. The NPR link suggests many schools put on content aimed at lower ages anyway, but god, even in middle school, our student body wouldn't have stood for that. Seussical, Disney Jr., etc, was considered elementary school content. We never did anything else from Disney Theatrical, either. This was partly because it was expensive as fuck, but partly because the teachers felt theater should be a space for new experiences, not the regurgitation of films we'd all seen multiple times. But in a school with fewer theater kids, or more parents who get upset about content issues, the calculus may be different.
In my city, beyond Shakespeare and the Greeks, there's a pretty even balance between what's currently popular, and older standards. I see a wider variety of material, and greater respect for student maturity, than elsewhere. My other residence is a small, isolated city in a conservative region, and it's straight-up bleak for youth theater. As in, if you're a teen who wants to act in literally anything other than Disney, Matilda, or Tuck Everlasting, forget it.
Common productions (sans Shakespeare/Greeks), older:
The Crucible
Into the Woods
You Can't Take It With You
The Wiz/Wizard of Oz
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Our Town
The Music Man
Company
Guys and Dolls
Hairspray
Twelve Angry Jurors (formerly "Men")
Diary of Anne Frank
Rent
Little Shop of Horrors
Common productions, newer:
Addams Family
Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
Legally Blonde
In the Heights
Spring Awakening (musical)
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime
Footloose
The Wolves
Clue
The Laramie Project
The Drowsy Chaperone
Urinetown
posted by desert outpost at 10:20 PM on January 10, 2022 [3 favorites]
Kids will always "play up" though, due to the dearth of quality drama meant to be performed by teens. And like, more high schoolers want to pretend to be adults than they want to be in Seussical. The NPR link suggests many schools put on content aimed at lower ages anyway, but god, even in middle school, our student body wouldn't have stood for that. Seussical, Disney Jr., etc, was considered elementary school content. We never did anything else from Disney Theatrical, either. This was partly because it was expensive as fuck, but partly because the teachers felt theater should be a space for new experiences, not the regurgitation of films we'd all seen multiple times. But in a school with fewer theater kids, or more parents who get upset about content issues, the calculus may be different.
In my city, beyond Shakespeare and the Greeks, there's a pretty even balance between what's currently popular, and older standards. I see a wider variety of material, and greater respect for student maturity, than elsewhere. My other residence is a small, isolated city in a conservative region, and it's straight-up bleak for youth theater. As in, if you're a teen who wants to act in literally anything other than Disney, Matilda, or Tuck Everlasting, forget it.
Common productions (sans Shakespeare/Greeks), older:
The Crucible
Into the Woods
You Can't Take It With You
The Wiz/Wizard of Oz
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Our Town
The Music Man
Company
Guys and Dolls
Hairspray
Twelve Angry Jurors (formerly "Men")
Diary of Anne Frank
Rent
Little Shop of Horrors
Common productions, newer:
Addams Family
Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
Legally Blonde
In the Heights
Spring Awakening (musical)
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime
Footloose
The Wolves
Clue
The Laramie Project
The Drowsy Chaperone
Urinetown
posted by desert outpost at 10:20 PM on January 10, 2022 [3 favorites]
My local performing arts magnet school did Urinetown in the fall (looks like a popular choice!) and will be doing Pride and Prejudice in the spring.
posted by basalganglia at 1:08 AM on January 11, 2022
posted by basalganglia at 1:08 AM on January 11, 2022
Playbill published a list from a survey by the Education Theatre Foundation, part of the organization that includes the Thespian Society.
https://www.playbill.com/article/the-10-most-produced-high-school-plays-and-musicals-of-20202021
posted by tmdonahue at 5:38 AM on January 11, 2022 [2 favorites]
https://www.playbill.com/article/the-10-most-produced-high-school-plays-and-musicals-of-20202021
posted by tmdonahue at 5:38 AM on January 11, 2022 [2 favorites]
My inlaws do the sets for the HS shows in their town. Recent ones include:
Peter and the Starcatcher
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
Radium Girls
Almost, Maine
posted by Betelgeuse at 5:58 AM on January 11, 2022 [1 favorite]
Peter and the Starcatcher
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
Radium Girls
Almost, Maine
posted by Betelgeuse at 5:58 AM on January 11, 2022 [1 favorite]
Our local children's theatre has recently done Cinderella, The Snow Queen, Mary Poppins, Clue, and Babes in Toyland (heavily musical focused). In addition to things mentioned above, I've seen recently You're a Good Man Charlie Brown and "Night Chills" which was several Edgar Allen Poe stories.
posted by dpx.mfx at 7:59 AM on January 11, 2022
posted by dpx.mfx at 7:59 AM on January 11, 2022
Best answer: Minnesota high school in ruralish conservative suburb, strong theater department, recent shows (past 10 years), newest to oldest:
Seussical!
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time
13 the Musical
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Our Town
And Then There Were None
My Fair Lady
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
The Addams Family
All in the Timing
The Wizard of Oz
The Crucible
Anything Goes
The Laramie Project
A Year with Frog and Toad
You Can't Take it With You
High School Musical
12 Angry Jurors
posted by castlebravo at 8:38 AM on January 11, 2022
Seussical!
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time
13 the Musical
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Our Town
And Then There Were None
My Fair Lady
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
The Addams Family
All in the Timing
The Wizard of Oz
The Crucible
Anything Goes
The Laramie Project
A Year with Frog and Toad
You Can't Take it With You
High School Musical
12 Angry Jurors
posted by castlebravo at 8:38 AM on January 11, 2022
Best answer: YU (younger urchin) was a theater geek the last two years of HS (graduated 2015). Rural-ish, upper midwest; Fall musical/winter OneAct/Spring play; content issues abound. The shows I remember:
Guys and Dolls
Footloose
Steel Magnolias (book rental required no cross-gender casting)
Much Ado About Nothing
Cinderella
Beauty and the Beast
The King and I (community theater)
Little Shop of Horrors (community theater)
One Act (competitive theater):
Red Dress Diaries (original)
The Firecracker Incident (black box)
posted by jlkr at 9:27 AM on January 11, 2022
Guys and Dolls
Footloose
Steel Magnolias (book rental required no cross-gender casting)
Much Ado About Nothing
Cinderella
Beauty and the Beast
The King and I (community theater)
Little Shop of Horrors (community theater)
One Act (competitive theater):
Red Dress Diaries (original)
The Firecracker Incident (black box)
posted by jlkr at 9:27 AM on January 11, 2022
Large public high school in the Philadelphia area, 1998-2002. I wasn't involved in the non-musical theater side of things, but for musicals we did:
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
Amahl and the Night Visitors
Once on this Island
Cabaret
Guys and Dolls
And a very weird, semi-musical version of Don Quixote (NOT Man of La Mancha) which I and the other strings were pretty much sight-reading the music for.
posted by lharmon at 9:32 AM on January 11, 2022
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
Amahl and the Night Visitors
Once on this Island
Cabaret
Guys and Dolls
And a very weird, semi-musical version of Don Quixote (NOT Man of La Mancha) which I and the other strings were pretty much sight-reading the music for.
posted by lharmon at 9:32 AM on January 11, 2022
I attended a Catholic HS in the early eighty's in upstate NY. The priests (and nuns) ran a play the first semester, then a musical the second semester. They customized the musicals to reflect the talents (or lack of) in those students to wished to perform. Students were assigned songs, and worked with religious who coached your performance.
The musicals really were not musicals, but performance of specific songs that fit the student's strengths.
The school was not large. Between sports, musicals, plays and homework, most students were involved in a multiple of activities. My Senior year, most of the football team defense sang "There's Nothin' Like A Dame" in the musical. I played baseball, and half the team was in the number "Gee, Officer Krupke". I remember before an away game, we were tossing the ball around to warm up and guys started singing their parts. The looks from the opposing bench will stay with me forever.
Odd note, several priests wrote their OWN music and songs for these musicals. There were some very talented people teaching at my school.
posted by Colonel Sun at 12:29 PM on January 11, 2022
The musicals really were not musicals, but performance of specific songs that fit the student's strengths.
The school was not large. Between sports, musicals, plays and homework, most students were involved in a multiple of activities. My Senior year, most of the football team defense sang "There's Nothin' Like A Dame" in the musical. I played baseball, and half the team was in the number "Gee, Officer Krupke". I remember before an away game, we were tossing the ball around to warm up and guys started singing their parts. The looks from the opposing bench will stay with me forever.
Odd note, several priests wrote their OWN music and songs for these musicals. There were some very talented people teaching at my school.
posted by Colonel Sun at 12:29 PM on January 11, 2022
My daughter's public high school just did "Little Shop of Horrors" and are performing "Clue" in the spring.
posted by tacodave at 5:01 PM on January 11, 2022
posted by tacodave at 5:01 PM on January 11, 2022
Best answer: My kid is -heavily- involved in theater, both school and community. Really any stage inside about an hours drive, she'll want to be on it. As far as community theater, the local ones all have either a 'kids' theater program (roughly 5-12 or so) and then a 'teen' program (13-18) In the last few years, the shows she's done that fall into the middle/high school realm:
School
Fiddler on the Roof
Sound of Music
Babka Without Borders
a selection from Shakespeare
Our Town
Community, 'kid' shows, aka Lots of Disney
Aladdin Jr
Lion King Jr
Frozen Jr
Shrek Jr
Community, Teen shows
A Chorus Line, HS edition
Into the Woods
Community, adult shows with kid roles
Fun Home
Oliver
Seussical
Peter and Wendy
Annie
A Christmas Story, the musical
posted by griffey at 12:55 PM on January 12, 2022
School
Fiddler on the Roof
Sound of Music
Babka Without Borders
a selection from Shakespeare
Our Town
Community, 'kid' shows, aka Lots of Disney
Aladdin Jr
Lion King Jr
Frozen Jr
Shrek Jr
Community, Teen shows
A Chorus Line, HS edition
Into the Woods
Community, adult shows with kid roles
Fun Home
Oliver
Seussical
Peter and Wendy
Annie
A Christmas Story, the musical
posted by griffey at 12:55 PM on January 12, 2022
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It is a discouraging trend, because the creativity and originality of live theatrical performance is mass-produced.
posted by ohshenandoah at 5:41 PM on January 10, 2022 [5 favorites]