2023-2024 Season
October - Honors Performance
21 Chump Street is a fourteen-minute one-act musical with book, music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is known for creating the Broadway musicals In the Heights, Bring It On the Musical, and Hamilton. The show was based on the second act of episode #457 of This American Life, titled "What I Did For Love" and reported by Robbie Brown, in which a high school student, Justin Laboy, falls in love with an undercover police officer, and is ultimately arrested for selling drugs to the officer in an attempt to impress her. The musical is based on this real event and the writer even chose to keep Justin's name in the show. The title is a satirical reference to the 1987 TV show 21 Jump Street which was about undercover narcotics agents in a high school. The musical premiered in a showcase put on by This American Life, held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on June 7, 2014, and broadcast as episode #528, "The Radio Drama Episode".
November - Fall Play
Tony-winning Peter and the Starcatcher upends the century-old story of how a miserable orphan comes to be The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up (a.k.a. Peter Pan). A wildly theatrical adaptation of Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson’s best-selling novels, the play was conceived for the stage by directors, Roger Rees and Alex Timbers, and written by Rick Elice, with music by Wayne Barker. From marauding pirates and jungle tyrants to unwilling comrades and unlikely heroes, Peter and the Starcatcher playfully explores the depths of greed and despair... and the bonds of friendship, duty and love.
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Peter and the Starcatcher
By A Backstage Studio Production Limited Seating - Reservations Encouraged Direction: Karen Ball Scenic Design: Ross Wheeler Lighting Design: Maria Carrillo Photography: Kulick Studio Hawks Auditorium East Aurora High School 500 Tomcat Lane, Aurora, IL 60505 |
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December - Classroom Productions
March 15th, 2024 - IHSA Competition Play
Radium Girls
IHSA Contest Play By D.W. Gregory FREE Admission Hawks Auditorium March 15th, 2024 - 6 PM |
In 1926, radium was a miracle cure, Madame Curie an international celebrity, and luminous watches the latest rage—until the girls who painted them began to fall ill with a mysterious disease. Inspired by a true story, Radium Girls traces the efforts of Grace Fryer, a dial painter, as she fights for her day in court. Her chief adversary is her former employer, Arthur Roeder, an idealistic man who cannot bring himself to believe that the same element that shrinks tumors could have anything to do with the terrifying rash of illnesses among his employees. As the case goes on, however, Grace finds herself battling not just with the U.S. Radium Corporation but also with her own family and friends, who fear that her campaign for justice will backfire.