Hitting the high notes
Writerproducer Jason Katims brings Broadway drama to a smalltown high school in Rise, writes Meredith Blake.
Ayoung man named Robbie stands in the wings of a darkened theatre, nervously awaiting his big moment on stage.
‘‘You are going to be amazing. Enjoy it,’’ whispers his teacher, Lou, a bearded fortysomething.
‘‘I think you might have changed my life,’’ says his freshfaced pupil.
‘‘Right back at’cha,’’ replies Lou, sending his pupil off with an encouraging nudge to the shoulder.
A few feet away, a Steadicam operator films the heartwarming exchange for a climactic episode of
Rise.
The scene, performed by Damon Gillespie as the student and Josh Radnor as the teacher, is scripted, but the creators of the series — which follows the underfunded theatre programme at a smalltown Pennsylvania high school as it attempts an ambitious staging of
Spring Awakening — hope that it plays authentically.
Created by Jason Katims, the writerproducer behind Friday Night
Lights and Parenthood, Rise is filming on a Brooklyn soundstage where a 312seat theatre, complete with fake cinderblock walls, has been built from scratch and is filled with background players pretending to be audience members.
Cameras capture their reactions, the performance onstage and other key moments in the wings. A hallway offstage right is lined with racks of costumes and posters for fictional productions of Godspell and
Footloose. On this particular set, the proverbial ‘‘fourth wall’’ is virtually impossible to locate.
‘‘We really are doing a show within a show,’’ says Katims, perched behind a monitor. ‘‘It’s really exciting, but it was a much bigger undertaking than I probably realised. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle — a lot simpler to write than it is to produce.’’
Radnor stars as Lou Mazzuchelli, an English teacher who volunteers on a whim to take over his school’s drama programme. Instead of yet another production of Grease, he decides to stage Spring Awakening, Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater’s Tonywinning 2006 musical about sexually repressed teenagers in 19thcentury Germany. His decision raises eyebrows in a depressed steel town that values football over the arts or academics. Mazzuchelli also clashes with Tracey Wolfe (Rosie Perez), a teacher who’s been involved in the drama programme for decades and resents his interference, starting with his decision to cast football star Robbie (Gillespie) and his crush, Lilette Suarez (Auli’i Cravalho), as romantic leads Melchior and Wendla.
Lou’s fight to bring Spring
Awakening to the stage is just one of the dramatic plots that unfurl in Rise, an ensemble piece that blends grownup turmoil with adolescent angst and takes on realworld issues like coming out, teen alcohol abuse and economic uncertainty.
It’s familiar ground for Katims, a
showrunner who knows how to give viewers all the feels with his engrossing intergenerational family dramas (Parenthood) and nuanced portraits of smalltown life (Friday
Night Lights).
‘‘A really important thing to me about Rise is it’s not a show about a drama programme,’’ Katims says. ‘‘It’s a show about this community, about these characters, about these people’s lives. It’s what I’m invested in, and I’m hoping that that’s what the audience gets invested in as well.’’
The show has widely been billed as
Friday Night Lights meets Glee, but while there are plans to release a cast album, stylistically it is much closer to the former show. Noone breaks into song spontaneously, and Rise is full of the signature Katims flourishes: a moody, contemporary soundtrack and lots of handheld camerawork ‘‘to make you feel like you were dropped down into this world’’, he says.
The series is based on Drama High, a nonfiction book by Michael Sokolove about the drama programme at Harry S. Truman High School in Levittown, Pennsylvania, where Broadway producers often workshop challenging or provocative shows for use by high schools across the country. The programme was run for decades by Lou Volpe, the loose inspiration for Radnor’s character.
Katims was instantly sold on the material.
‘‘I was very touched by the story of what Lou did,’’ he says. ‘‘This was in a small American town, a place where they didn’t have a lot of resources, and these were not kids who were going on to be Broadway stars. They were kids that really needed something in their lives. They needed that mentor, whether they knew they needed it or not.’’
Katims is a Brooklyn native, raised about 15km south of the Rise studio in a middleclass neighbourhood, where he attended Edward R. Murrow High School. Asked about his affinity for shows set in high school, he jokes, ‘‘My development is stunted at 16 years old.’’
Neither a jock nor a theatre geek, he discovered a passion for playwriting only in college. ‘‘Weirdly, that gives me an advantage because it makes me be able to come in and really learn about the world and see it for what it is and embrace its beauty. I wasn’t a football person, but when I flew to Texas [for Friday Night Lights] and started researching the world of high school football, I was in love. And I feel the same thing about this.’’
Radnor, on the other hand, starred in high school productions of
Oklahoma! and Cabaret (in the latter, he played the MC) and performs as a duo with singersongwriter Ben Lee. (On the Rise set, he can be found strumming his guitar between takes.) He’s excited that Rise has the potential to bring Spring Awakening, and musical theatre more broadly, to the masses.
‘‘Broadway plays can only hold so many people a night, whereas many, many more people will watch [television] on Wednesday,’’ Radnor says.
After so many years as Ted Mosby, the manchild protagonist in How I
Met Your Mother, the 43yearold is excited to play a grownup. ‘‘I don’t have teenage children,’’ he says, ‘‘but I do have some greying temples.’’
Perez says the message of Rise struck a chord with her. She, like Katims, was raised in Brooklyn.
‘‘I believe that when you introduce the arts to a child’s life, it opens them up in ways that you can never imagine,’’ she says.
‘‘It worked for me.’’
One of the challenges of Rise is striking the right aesthetic balance: Lou’s production of Spring Awakening has to look like something cobbled together by highschoolers on a shoestring budget, while also being something people will want to watch on TV.
Gillespie, a former high school quarterback who has appeared in Broadway productions of Newsies and
Aladdin, had to play the role of Melchior as jockturnedtheatrestar Robbie would do it, not himself. He focused on acting with his voice, rather than his face or body. During dance numbers, he remembered not to point his toes. ‘‘We can’t be so technical and so clean with our performances,’’ he explains.
Cravalho has never performed on Broadway but is known as the voice of the plucky title character in Moana.
Still a student herself — she’s due to graduate from high school in a few weeks — she sees Rise as a timely story about her generation.
‘‘There’s something to be said about the strength of students and young people across America in the last month or two,’’ she says, referring to the activists at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, ‘‘and the change that can really be seen through these students. Our show touches on what some might call controversial topics, but they’re just real.’’ — TCA
Rise premieres tomorrow, on Lightbox.