The festival took place from Friday, Jan. 13 through Sunday, Jan. 15 in Atlanta, Ga.
Students from Moorestown Theater Company, Berlin and Mt. Laurel’s Curtain Call’s Page to Stage Players and Curtain Call’s Spotlight Performers won national awards and recognition at the 2017 iTheatrics Junior Theater Festival Atlanta, which took place from Friday, Jan. 13 through Sunday, Jan. 15 at the Cobb Galleria Centre in Atlanta, Ga.
The Moorestown Theater Company won a Freddie G Group Award for Excellence in Acting, and Curtain Call’s Page to Stage Players also won a Freddie G Group Award for Excellence in Acting.
Curtain Call’s Spotlight Performers student Emma Diner won the Freddie G Award for Excellent Individual Performance by a Female, while Phil Pagano won the Freddie G Broadway Junior Slam Award. The Broadway Junior Slam is a theatrical challenge in which students who don’t know each other must stage and perform a song from a musical in an hour.
Curtain Call Performing Arts Center’s Spotlight Performers’s Connor Zeidman, Carleigh Elizbaeth Moos, Audrey Floyd, Alexander James Love and Alyssa Miles, and Curtain Call’s Page to Stage Player Emma Hong, were six of 142 students who made it to the call-back for future Broadway Junior shoots for “how-to” choreography videos for soon-to-be released Broadway Junior musicals.
The shoots will be taped in New York City this summer. The Broadway Junior scouts were on the lookout for outstanding students, out of 5,800 students at the festival, 500 were invited to audition for iTheatrics resident choreographer, Steven G. Kennedy. The final cast will be determined later this year, and these videos will be used in tens of thousands of schools across the country and internationally.
The 17 students representing Curtain Call’s Page to Stage Players, from ages 7 to 12, presented selections from Disney’s “The Lion King Kids” for producing artistic director at Adventure Theatre MTC Michael Bobbit and Megan Alrutz, the associate professor of drama and rheatre for youth and communities and head of drama at the University of Texas at Austin.
“These kids are meant to be in theater. I am so excited to spend thousands of dollars to pay for tickets to see them in future Broadway shows,” Bobbit said.
“The choreography was imaginative and the students told this story with skill and heart. The broad age range in this ensemble paid off- we loved this performance,” Alrutz said.
The 26 students representing Curtain Call Performing Arts Center’s Spotlight Performers, from ages 10 to 16, presented selections from Roald Dahl’s “James and the Giant Peach Jr.” for performer and vocal coach Amanda Flynn (first national tour of Susan Stroman and Trevor Nunn’s Oklahoma) and for Jeff Calhoun (“Bonnie & Clyde,” “Newsies”), an American director, choreographer, producer and dancer. He is also the owner of the Amanda Flynn Voice Studio.
“This cast worked together extremely well! They did Roald Dahl proud,” Calhoun said.
“The kids really did work together seamlessly,” Flynn said.
The students representing Moorestown Theater Company presented selections from Disney’s “Peter Pan Jr.” for composer, director, producer and music director David Weinstein (“The Musical Adventures of Flat Stanley,” Roald Dahl’s “James and the Giant Peach”) and Kennedy Center director Deirdre Kelly Lavrakas (“Walking in the Winds: American Tales and Walking in the Winds: Arabian Tales” — a co-production with the Performing Arts Center of Amman, Jordan), who directed two musical theatre reviews for a state department tour of South Asia and has led drama workshops for teachers and students in Bahrain.
“Moorestown Theater Company’s wonderful performance of ‘Peter Pan Jr.’ showed great depth,” Lavrakas said.
Moorestown Theater Company’s Aren Duffy and Juliet Morgan; Curtain Call Performing Arts Center’s Spotlight Performers’s AJ Love and Erika Kessler, and Curtain Call’s Page to Stage Players’s Casey Cornwell and Emma Hong were named to the Junior Theater Festival All-Stars, made up of outstanding performers attending the festival. The All-Stars performed a song during the closing ceremony for all 6,000 festival attendees.
Produced by the Junior Theater Group in partnership with iTheatrics, a leading educational theater company that creates innovative experiences and products for the public and private sector, the iTheatrics Junior Theater Festival Atlanta is the world’s largest festival celebrating young people and the transformative power of musical theater. This year’s title sponsors were Music Theatre International, Disney Theatrical Group, and Playbill, Inc. The Junior Theater Festival was founded in 2003, and in 2010 the festival became an annual event.
Disney Theatrical President Thomas Schumacher; Broadway director, choreographer, producer and dancer, Calhoun; Broadway choreographer, director and performer Christopher Gattelli (“South Pacific”, “Newsies”); composer Zina Goldrich & lyricist Marcy Heisler (“Junie B. Jones,” “Dear Edwina”); Arielle Jacobs (“Wicked,” Disney’s “Aladdin in Sydney”), Curt Hansen (Broadway’s “Hairspray!,” “Wicked” national tour), Luca Padovan (Broadway’s “School of Rock,” Broadway’s “Newsies”), and New York Times best-selling authors Jodi Picoult (“Small Great Things”) and Mary Pope Osborne (“The Magic Treehouse” series) were some of the celebrities at the festival cheering them on.
