‘Rise’ brings high drama to teenage musical
NEW YORK – Whoever said “war is hell” clearly hadn’t experienced high-school theater tech week. In a late-season episode of NBC’s new musical drama Rise, premiering Tuesday (10 ET/PT), a ragtag group of students at Stanton High School are rehearsing provocative rock musical Spring Awakening, which has caused waves of controversy in their fictional Pennsylvania town.
But days away from opening night, nerves are starting to get the best of its young cast and stagehands. Dashing onstage, one student rips her dress sleeve on the show’s industrial set; moments later, another kid working the soundboard misses his cue as he texts on his phone, bringing a raucous production number to a screeching halt. Sitting in a darkened auditorium — created on a Brooklyn sound stage — teachers Lou (Josh Radnor) and Tracey (Rosie
Perez) bury their heads in their hands as they watch students flail their arms and knock into each other performing another ensemble dance scene, sending one girl toppling.
“That was really bad, and by really bad, I mean really good,” choreographer Danny Mefford says, applauding Rise’s young actors after they finish an intentionally messy take.
“Yay!” cheers Moana’s Auli’i Cravalho, 17, who plays mousy introvert Lilette.
“For any theater folk out there, this is going to be the most stressful episode, because they’ll know exactly what (these characters are) going through,” says her co-star, Damon J. Gillespie, 23, on set last fall. “But so far, it looks like we’re going to pull through.”
Rise was created by Jason Katims, best known for earnest family dramas Parenthood and Friday Night Lights. The show is based on Michael Sokolove’s book Drama High, which tells the true story of a high-school teacher who tries to shake up the drama program in his recession-plagued blue-collar town.
Katims wasn’t a musical-theater buff growing up, but took playwriting classes in college, which kindled an interest in the art form. With Rise, he wanted to explore issues affecting teenagers in a close-knit community, as characters grapple with sexuality, pregnancy, alcoholism, and divorce.
“I really liked the idea that it wasn’t going to be about the High School of Performing Arts or these people destined to be Broadway stars,” Katims says.
“It was really about these people in this working-class town, and how having this mentor like Lou helps them realize what their lives could be. It’s sort of a cousin to Friday Night Lights in that way, and I wanted the show to have that feeling.”
The main source of tension for the town’s adults is Lou taking over the theater program from Tracey, the longtime department head who prefers to put on more traditional productions such as Grease, so as not to offend potential donors to the school.
“Her need and her desire to concentrate on more fluffy musicals is because she wants to drive ticket sales and not rock the boat in a small town,” says Perez ( Fearless). “When Lou comes around and rocks that boat, she panics and tries to inform him this is a mistake.” But slowly, “she starts to see Lou as a progressive man with progressive ideas, and she doesn’t want to admit it, but she admires that a lot and sees that his direction can elevate the lives of these kids.”
Tracey soon becomes Lou’s ally as he squares off with conservative school administrators and parents offended by Awakening’s racy material (the musical tackles sex, masturbation, suicide and child abuse). He must also try to woo Robbie (Gillespie), the varsity quarterback whose coach will stop at nothing to keep him on the field and off stage.
“There aren’t proper villains in this piece, but there are tons of obstacles,” says Radnor, best known for CBS’ How I Met Your Mother. Lou is “doing this show that he suspects will be boundarypushing and will upset some people, but he’s tired of the same old safe highschool theater.”
Katims is a fan of Fox’s long-running Glee, but cautions against easy comparisons. Although both are music-driven high-school shows in which the star quarterback is recruited to sing, Rise features less comedy and no fantasy sequences; its characters break into song only in performance settings.
And while other musical dramas, such as CMT’s Nashville and Fox’s Empire, have made prodigious use of AutoTune, Katims strives for authentic, raw vocals from his cast.
“They are incredibly talented young performers, and we kind of laughed, because there were certain moments when it was hard to make them not look as good,” Katims says. “Of course, the story’s not that they’re bad — it’s that they’re real, and there are moments when they’re going to shine and moments when they’re going to be overwhelmed. That’s the beauty of it and what we’re trying to capture.”
Gillespie, who juggled recreational football and dance classes before pursuing theater, already has an impressive resume that includes Broadway’s Aladdin and Newsies. He considers Rise something of a homecoming after performing in a regional theater production of Awakening, in which he played Melchior, the same character as his character Robbie does.
Returning to the musical four years later “is a really nostalgic moment, but it’s also really cool because I get to experience it in a whole new way,” Gillespie says. As the season goes on, Robbie’s struggle between theater and football only gets worse, he adds, especially as his character starts to fall for Lilette, who’s cast as his love interest, Wendla, in Awakening.
“In some sense, this is like my quintessential high school experience: I get to date a (quarterback) and then be in a really awesome production — things I did not get to do when I was actually in high school,” Cravalho laughs.