Weston Porter, 14, performs during his audition. Students recited original and published monologues and six lines from Lewis Carroll’s tongue-twisting poem “Jabberwocky,” and sang a Broadway show tune.
Sunday, Feb. 24, 2008 | 2 a.m.
Beyond the Sun
This is as nerve-racking as it gets at Las Vegas’ premier performing arts academy, the high school that prepares edgy teenagers for the kinds of auditions that have played out on “Fame,” “A Chorus Line,” “Flashdance” and “American Idol.”
Their first audition: just to get into this place.
And so on this sunny afternoon, hundreds of kinetic eighth graders, emitting an energized mix of nerves and showoffiness and accompanied by their equally anxious parents, are hoping to gain admission to the Las Vegas Academy of International Studies, Performing and Visual Arts.
At stake: one of the few precious spots in theater or dance at the nationally prestigious magnet school.
And they’re being tantalized by the sight of a paying crowd next door, lining up for a matinee student performance of the Broadway musical “Cats” in the school’s 1,400-seat theater. Performing arts are serious business here.
“This is a Grammy Award-winning school, and they just have such a great reputation that if you happen to get in it could really do something for you,” blurts aspiring actor Weston Porter, a precociously poised 14-year-old eighth grader from Bob Miller Middle School with sights on the arts academy.
Porter’s mother, Brenda, left, and friends greet him after his audition. In his original monologue he called theater “the ultimate exercise in free expression.” His song was “Where Is Love” from “Oliver.”
Theater faculty members, from left, Robert Connor, Melissa Lilly and Glenn Edwards judge the auditions for aspiring performers at the downtown school.
Mug shots of applicants to the Las Vegas Academy of International Studies, Performing and Visual Arts are displayed at auditions for eighth graders trying to get in.
With only a little prompting from his parents (and because it’s another chance to rehearse), Porter launches into the monologue he wrote as part of his audition:
“For over 2,000 years theater has been a major component in Western civilization,” he begins in a soft, steady voice. “From the ancient Greek tragedies to Shakespeare to Broadway and beyond, theater has captivated our imaginations and captured our hearts. Theater can represent all phases of human existence — emotions are captured, political thought is swayed and theater becomes the moral compass of each and every generation. Theater is the ultimate exercise in free expression, allowing me as an actor to impact the social course of my generation.”
Outside, Sarah Shelton, 13, is privately practicing her monologue in the shade.
“I love to act and I love performing for people, and I’m planning on making a career out of it,” explains Shelton, who has been cast as Sharpay, one of the lead roles in her school’s upcoming production of “High School Musical.”
And now it’s showtime. Clutching their head shots, paperwork and their accompaniment CDs, Porter and Shelton are among the first dozen called to their seats in the darkened theater. There are audible outbreaks of jitters and jokes, and a bossy senior in charge of corralling and calming the teenagers leads the terrified group in a relaxation exercise.
One at a time, the kids are directed to a white line onstage, behind the curtain, where they face a Randy-Paula-Simon trio of adult judges, all instructors at the school. For them, the students will present both an original monologue and a published one, recite six lines from Lewis Carroll’s tongue-twisting poem “Jabberwocky” and finish with a Broadway song of their choice.
Porter produces a surprisingly big voice as he whizzes through his big speech and applies a plaintive tenor to the “Where Is Love” from the Broadway play “Oliver.”
“Next!”
Shelton begins her gymnastic rendition of “Let Me Entertain You” with a startling back bend. Judges’ mouths drop.
“Next!”
One by one, the remaining auditioners are efficiently ushered on and offstage by the academy’s teenage vets, who offer seen-it-all sympathy (while sometimes secretly rolling their eyes at each other). One girl blames her nerves after veering repeatedly into an (awful) English accent.
It’s nerve-racking. It’s heartbreaking. It’s showbiz.
One of the judges is theater department facilitator Robert Connor, who sees hundreds of kids — including some from out of state — audition for each program. “It’s amazing to watch how these frail, nervous eighth graders kind of blossom,” he says. He mentions Rutina Wesley (class of 1997), who went on to a fine arts degree and four years of acting training at Juilliard School in New York. Wesley was one of the leads in the recent movie “How She Move,” and just completed a run on Broadway with Julianne Moore in “The Vertical Hour.”
Today is the first of three annual auditions at the school. Connor is sitting through too many tunes from “Hairspray,” “Wicked” and especially “High School Musical,” which he grumbles is a “dumbed-down Disney-fication” of musical theater. “We always want to challenge our kids to do new and innovative works, to do things that are more on the cutting edge, that would prepare them for a college program or a conservatory. We have a rigorous program, and we have a hotbed of talent.”
Their future? “The type of kid we’re to develop is more of a New York musical theater performer or an L.A. film actor” than a Vegas entertainer, Connor said.
As another group of 12 innocents is ushered into the theater for judgment, the first group straggles from the shadows of the theater, dazed and blinking into the sunlight, where the kids cross paths with the crowd lining up for “Cats.”
This is what it’s all about: the year’s major production by the Las Vegas Academy Theatre, in association with the academy’s music and dance departments. “Cats” is a bear to produce, and few commercial producers could afford to stage a presentation of this scale. The arts academy version features more than 50 performers, 34 musicians in the orchestra pit and more than 70 students and faculty working behind the scenes and at the front of the house.
Teenage ushers wear shirts and ties and cat-ear headbands. Students behind a concession stand sell “Catnip” — chocolate-covered popcorn — in bags accessorized with tiger-striped ribbon. Signed theatrical posters and other memorabilia are displayed in the lobby, the trappings of a silent auction to benefit Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. (The academy is the organization’s most successful fundraising school in the country.)
There are hints of “Dreamgirls,” and even a wink at Bette Midler’s just-opened “The Showgirl Must Go On” in this ambitious adaptation of the 1981 T.S. Eliot via Andrew Lloyd Webber Broadway hit. The director, theater instructor Glenn Edwards, cleverly moves the annual gathering of felines to a Las Vegas neon graveyard, and every cat on the stage is related to someone in Las Vegas history. (There was even a feline equivalent of Mayor Oscar Goodman.)
Costumed kiddie-cats prowl the aisles; the multilevel junkyard blinks and blares with neon and relics of casino signs. Julian Crowder remakes his “Rum Tum Tugger” a la Michael Jackson and leads the ensemble “Jellicle Ball” dance in an extended parody of Jackson’s “Thriller” that cracks up the audience. Choir major Lynda DeFuria, in the lead role of Grizabella the Glamour Cat, sends the show’s big number, “Memory,” soaring, with just the right note of melancholy and faded showbiz luster.
While the show goes on inside, three girls outside perch on the theater steps, excitedly comparing notes, sharing audition horror stories and daydreaming about someday stepping on that stage. Elayna Gibson, 16, Shawna Salamanopoulous, 16, and Corin Hudson, 14, were among more than 200 who auditioned for the dance department today, learning jazz and ballet combinations on the spot and performing them in groups of five.
Hudson’s mom beeps from the curb. It’s time to go home. And now comes the hardest part of show business.
The waiting.
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