CAPPING THE CAPPIES
Busy season winds down
“Only thing to do is jump/Only thing to do is jump over the moon,” sings an edgy performance artist in Rent, the 1996 Pulitzer-Prize-winning Broadway musical.
That kind of gravity-defying ambition is everywhere in the new generation of theatre talent, on and behind the stage. Their work this past season in 20 moon-vaulting productions at Edmonton-area schools is about to be celebrated, with Monday’s announcement of Cappies nominations in 41 categories — from actors to dancers, makeup artists to marketers, special effects whiz-kids to set designers, choreographers to critics.
The nominations list is the work of the critics themselves, some 170-plus student reviewers on 22 teams, who saw at least four shows each and voted this past weekend. Their training, and experience, are built into the Cappies, the Washington D.C.-based Critics and Awards program devoted to upping the profile of high school theatre, honing the skills of student writers, and burying forever the notion of the “drama nerd.”
The nominees will be honoured at a June 12 gala in the Citadel’s Maclab Theatre.
This year, the Cappies’ ninth season in this theatre town, the nominations were more evenly distributed among participating schools, with no shutouts. As Cappies director Chris Standring points out, “it suggests a strengthening of drama programs across the boards.” And the range of offerings under consideration by student critics suggests, as well, that no theme, production complexity or stylistic challenge was too daunting for high school theatre to tackle.
Critics saw vintage American comedies, like Kaufman and Hart’s 1939 classic The Man Who Came To Dinner at Millwoods Christian School. There were alternative versions of wellknown tales, like Archbishop Jordan’s The Other Cinderella, a punchy reimagining of the Grimm classic. How often do you get to see Cinderella be grouchy instead of mopey? There were stage versions of highstyle cultish gore-fests like Night of the Living Dead Live!, at Holy Trinity.
New for Cappies this year was the première of an original: Alice was created by its J.H. Picard High School director, with an ending rewritten by two students. Blessed Oscar Romero’s version of M*A*S*H included extra student-written scenes. And with Lillian Osborne’s production of Thornton Wilder’s groundbreaking minimalist classic Our Town, the Cappies ventured into new territory too — it was directed by two students, a Cappies first.
And there were big Broadway musicals, complex to stage and challenging to sing, among them Sondheim’s Into The Woods (J. Percy Page) and The Wizard of Oz (Harry Ainlay). In the end, in a three-way tie, the most nominations, at 16 each, went to three musicals — Rent, Rock of Ages, and Disney’s Little Mermaid — at three high schools, Strathcona, St. Joseph’s and Strathcona Christian Academy, respectively. Fifteen nominations went to Millwoods Christian School’s The Man Who Came To Dinner and J.H. Picard’s Alice, with 14 to Holy Trinity for Night of the Living Dead Live!, 13 to Bellerose Composite’s Mary Poppins, and W.P. Wagner for their radical modern retelling of Euripides’ great anti-war drama of The Trojan Women. Five schools are nominated for top critic team: Archbishop MacDonald, Harry Ainlay, Jasper Place, Millwoods Christian and Strathcona High School. For a full list of Cappies nominations, go to edmontonjournal.com.