NEW YORK
Broadway a big hit for Verdugo Hills High drama students
The Great White Way turns out to be the best lesson of all for the teens, who recently staged the musical 'Footloose.'
Behold America's theater capital, twinkling, preening, clanging, stoking ambitions and devouring tourist dollars.
Now behold the drama students of Verdugo Hills High School, their parents ferrying them from the San Fernando Valley to LAX, their jet nosing eastward, their headphones tuned to the Broadway channel. There are 14 of them, 14 to 18 years old, and this is their biggest field trip ever, a five-day blitz of Broadway shows and Manhattan landmarks.
Their jet zooms into Newark, N.J. Their bus rumbles through the Lincoln Tunnel. Their teacher-chaperons, John Lawler and Katherine Morrison, march them through
"It was beautiful!" 16-year-old Joshua Archer writes in his journal that first night. "The city was flawless with lights, billboards and the smell of fossil fuel!"
This is a rite of tourism -- your first Broadway show, your first circuit of Manhattan landmarks, your first chance to reconcile the real metropolis with the one you've read about and seen in so many still and moving pictures.
But things may have changed since you did it. Now, an undiscounted Broadway ticket routinely costs $110. Four of every five audience members are tourists. Little Italy is increasingly Chinese. Chinatown is increasingly Vietnamese. And Times Square is increasingly sleaze-free.
The kids are different too. Instead of relying on such films as "West Side Story," "Breakfast at Tiffany's" or
One Tujunga girl is startled to see so many Amish here. (No, she is told, they are Hasidic Jews.) Another arrives fairly sure that Manhattan is built on a floating island of landfill. We're a long way from Tujunga and from the Manhattan of their fathers and mothers, and there are questions.
Will they sleep? Will they be bored? Will they get mugged? Spend all their money on souvenir junk in the first six hours? Swoon under the spell of big-city magic? (Here are your spoilers: Not much; no; no; very nearly; and -- cue the Gershwin clarinet -- yes.)
"Something washed over me, and I connected to the spirit of the city," writes 16-year-old Sara Saavedra of the first night. "I sat in Virgil's BBQ a different person."
And that was before seeing any shows.
The next afternoon, after prowling the
They exit the theater all grins. Megan Mullally's singing, the monster's soft-shoe dancing, the 34-year-old movie jokes by
To raise the $1,600-per-person cost of this trip, these teens held a car wash, rummage sale and bake sale, cajoled their parents and counted heavily on Lawler to work school district funding sources. Though the neighborhood around the Verdugo Hills High campus in Tujunga includes many ranch homes and spacious lots, about 56% of the student body has family incomes low enough to qualify for reduced-price lunches. Universal Studios may be 15 miles away, but the atmosphere is more horsy than Hollywood.
In the city, they sleep three or four to a hotel room (in the tidy, efficient Wingate by Wyndham on West 35th Street). They travel by foot or subway, rely on the free hotel buffet for breakfast and eat a lot of hot dogs and pizza. Using group rates, they're paying about $50 each for their show tickets. Lawler and Morrison have lived and worked here, so they know the subways, the theaters and a lot of theater people. By 21st century standards, it's a pretty cheap trip.
Or it would be, if you didn't count the souvenirs. By the time they've capped their first full day with a ride to the 86th floor of the
"It was gonna be $100," says a triumphant John Seward, 16, grinning along with his likeness. "But I got him down to $20."
DAY 2: STURM, DRANG AND FLASHCARDS
Sarah stands along the waterfront, gazing at the sea.
"I've never seen the Atlantic Ocean," she says. "Wow. It's dirty."
"Santa Monica Bay is way dirtier," says Joe Kinney, 18.
They're on their way to the
On the subway back to the hotel, at least five of the 14 fall asleep. But a few hours later, they're on the march again.
The first stop is the Drama Book Shop, a longtime stage folk hangout where Lawler treats the graduating seniors to $25 gift certificates. Ian Campbell, 18, considers a collection of Agatha Christie plays. Chrissa, who is wearing green fishnet stockings and purple shoes tonight, reaches for monologues for women. Dylan Smith, 17, her boyfriend, peruses the monologues for men. John buys a set of flashcards bearing quotes from Shakespeare's plays and immediately sets to challenging his classmates, teachers and the booksellers. Others climb to the loft to paw through musical scores, half-singing to themselves.
Then comes "Spring Awakening," which won eight Tony Awards last year. Adapted from an 1891 play, the show is a coming-of-age story steeped in passion, wit, death, regret and crashing electric guitars. In other words, it's about 10,000 miles from "Young Frankenstein."
Before it's over, there's a suicide, a botched abortion (offstage) and another death. By the close of the first act -- an intense teenage love scene, no holds barred -- the kids are riveted, the girls intent, some of the boys spooked and squirming in their upper-balcony seats.
"I wasn't expecting that," says Michelle Miner, 14, during intermission.
Nearby, Joe arches his eyebrows, and Luke Martinez, 15, concentrates on his Rubik's Cube.
"That was the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my life," Sarah says. "I could not find one thing I didn't like."
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