The 30th anniversary of The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway (Photo by Jeremy Daniel)

By celebrating its 30th anniversary on Broadway last week, The Phantom of the Opera marked what now seems a never-ending series of milestones, having run longer than any show in Broadway history.

The seeming permanence of Phantom may mask its achievement, though it has an eight-year lead on the revival of Chicago and nine years on The Lion King. Even if it were to close tomorrow – and that’s not about to happen – it would take the better part of a decade before either of those surpassed it, if they could.

Congratulations are due, of course, to Andrew Lloyd Webber, but also to Richard Stilgoe, Charles Hart, Harold Prince, Gillian Lynne, Cameron Mackintosh and so many others.

There is a certain irony to Phantom’s stupendous run on Broadway, in the West End and around the world – as pointed out in Harold Prince’s autobiography Contradictions, recently revised and expanded as Sense of Occasion.

In the original 1974 book, Prince predicted that no show would ever run as long as Fiddler on the Roof, which he produced. In Sense of Occasion, he allows that he was wrong, with many shows having surpassed Fiddler – A Chorus Line, Rent, Les Misérables, Wicked and the aforementioned productions to name a few.

Last summer, Prince was quick to contradict a question I asked him about whether shows were being engineered for longer runs. He cited the international market for musicals, and for tourism, as the engine behind the longest-running shows.

What was happening wasn’t a creative decision, but rather a product of changing and expanding opportunities. Shows were running longer because ever more people wanted to see them, the new modes of marketing and because there were successive generations of new audiences.

Certainly long-running shows existed before Phantom and its brethren, but they weren’t in theatres as large, they didn’t play in as many cities, and they didn’t necessarily tour as extensively.

In the West End, The Mousetrap has run for longer, but it is a play, not a musical. In Paris, a revival of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano has been running at the tiny Theatre de la Huchette for some 60 years. In the late 1980s, I saw a production of The Three Sisters at Moscow Art Theatre that had been in the repertory since the 1940s. It may yet still be there for all I know. The Fantasticks ran for 42 years Off-Broadway at the Sullivan Street Playhouse.

Coming back to Broadway, the expanding list of long runs is something to marvel at, especially if you are among the fortunate who invested in the shows.

But just as the growing markets, according to Prince, expanded the sense of what a Broadway show could achieve, they have also fundamentally changed Broadway itself. I have heard more than a few people remark that they have been in the Majestic Theatre, home to Phantom, only once – or not at all – in their lifetimes.

That is obviously due to the Majestic having had only one show playing for 30 years; the previous tenant, 42nd Street, ran for six years before that.

I should note that Phantom has been around long enough that I saw it on a discounted student ticket. (Though it opened a while after I graduated from university, the friend who bought the seats was only six months past graduation.)

It is possible to applaud Phantom, Chicago and The Lion King and all of those who have made them possible and bask in their success, but also temper that appreciation with caution.

While only a handful of shows each decade will even approach Phantom’s phenomenal run – Hamilton seems poised to be the latest to join that esteemed pantheon – and maybe some will run for only a decade, the impact has already fundamentally changed Broadway.

With a finite number of theatres, hovering at about 40 despite the openings and closings, these hits end up restricting the opportunities for new Broadway work. It’s great news for theatre owners, but limiting for works that might truly benefit from the awareness and opportunity that Broadway affords as a result of its legacy.

Unlike some countries, where we read about purpose-built theatres for each new extravaganza, Manhattan affords little space for new venues, especially in the theatre district.

The Shubert Organization announced, not so long ago, that it would not pursue a new theatre in the area because the costs were prohibitive. Meanwhile, the new venues coming to Manhattan are performing arts centres, designed to house a variety of work.

Only if works can set up in other cities with populations and tourism that approach those of New York, and only if the media affords comparable attention to that devoted to Broadway, might we see an expansion of large-scale work.

Perhaps Chicago, Boston, Washington DC and Philadelphia, to name but four, could become home to long-term work that doesn’t need to play Broadway to ultimately reach vast audiences.

We must accept that the model has changed, as Prince noted, and so change the opportunities for production accordingly. Even leaving aside significant concerns about pricing and accessibility, Broadway’s own success may be limiting new Broadway-scale work.

Daveed Diggs and the ensemble of Hamilton (photo by Joan Marcus)

I am not a betting man, but if you are reading this column, I would wager that you’ve already listened to the Hamilton original cast recording. Yet given this publication’s UK reader base, and the relatively small number of people who have actually seen Hamilton in comparison to the number of albums sold, I’m also willing to bet that a great number of you haven’t yet seen the show.

I raise this issue not to once again lionize or even analyze Hamilton, but rather to raise the fact that the success of the Hamilton recording, a virtually complete version of the show’s through-sung score, means that a great many people who ultimately see Hamilton will do so while being very familiar with the full text. It’s quite possible they’ll be able to sing along.

To those who say that this has often been true for cast recordings, I would counter that few shows have been recorded so fully. Yes, many people know a musical’s songs before seeing it, and I know of many people who specifically prefer to listen to a score before seeing a show (though I’ve never understood the need). However, for most musicals, songs aren’t all there is. There are, of course, exceptions, such as Les Miserables and Jesus Christ Superstar, but I wonder whether those recordings were as widely heard as Hamilton prior to the shows being seen.

As the second Hamilton company prepares to begin performances in Chicago later this month, and other engagements are announced, it’s fair to say that the story will hold few surprises. Sure, there’s a brief neck-breaking moment that has no auditory presence, but even the story’s final chapter is pretty much a given to those who secure the golden tickets. As for Burr shooting Hamilton, that’s in most US history textbooks, and we probably wouldn’t have a show without it.

This textual familiarity affords a rare opportunity for making an important distinction too often lost on many theatregoers, and certainly on the casual ones, namely the difference between a play (or musical) as text and in production. The foreknowledge not only of the story, but of the very words of the piece, means that what will be new (video clips notwithstanding) is the direction, the set, the lights, the costumes and so on. Even people familiar with pictures and videos of the original Broadway cast will be embracing its physicality for the first time, without the “distraction” of trying to keep up with what is being sung. Yes, some will register vocal variances from the recording, especially with almost all of the original cast gone. Still, the primary focus will be on the non-auditory elements, as what they may have previously imagined is made flesh before them.

Some might be tempted to say that this holds true for Shakespeare plays, given how widely read, taught and seen his ‘greatest hits’ already are. I would counter that, yes, for regular theatregoers there is the opportunity to ultimately compare how productions differ over time, long after we’ve learned when Hamlet will stab Polonius, but I doubt that many people have ever seen Hamlet for the first time only after having committed the majority of the script to memory.

Many modern musicals, when staged indelibly the first time out, tend to form a template by which all subsequent productions – I refer not to companies stemming from the original, but later regional, university and amdram productions – model themselves. It wasn’t until John Doyle’s Sweeney Todd that that show was freed from the visual spirit of Harold Prince’s original staging; Cats is in the process of having its 1980s design re-imprinted on US audiences even as we speak.

So while we are in the full flush of Hamilmania, and long before its theatre audience numbers manage to equal or surpass its cast recording listeners, the show can be a teaching tool, not simply to students but to the public at large. The brains of countless fans have partitioned an area just for the recording masterminded by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Alex Lacamoire, but their visual imagination is still free until they see the work of Thomas Kail and his team. In that space, and for that time, theatregoers have the chance to explore and ultimately understand what it means to realise a production.

And I, having been fortunate enough to have seen Hamilton three times so far, already look forward to how another set of creative artists will reinterpret the show many years from now. If I live that long.

This post originally appeared in The Stage newspaper.

Andy Huntington Jones in Cats (Photo by Matthew Murphy)

In hindsight, the slogan ‘now and forever’ looks a bit less like marketing and a bit more like hubris. While it didn’t run forever, on the U.S. side of the Atlantic, the musical Cats maintains a formidable place in the annals of longest-running Broadway shows, surpassed only by The Lion King, the revival of Chicago and The Phantom of the Opera. While those latter three shows are all still chugging along, meaning they’re widening their lead over Cats, it’s going to take another four years or so before Wicked takes over the number four slot on the list – though that looks to be an increasingly likely achievement.

When the revival of Cats opens on Broadway on Sunday, in an open-ended run (in contrast to its recent limited-run engagements in the West End), it finds itself in a very different marketplace to the Broadway of the early 1980s, one that it helped to create through its success. The 1980s were a period when Broadway was in a slump, with theatres being demolished to make way for more lucrative real estate, and one even sold to a church. Now, musicals that run for fewer than five years can in some cases be seen as disappointments; 10-year runs are increasingly commonplace, if not exactly run of the mill.

The arrival of Cats, riding on a crest of acclaim from London back in 1982, was a big cultural event. Tickets for it in its first years were as dear as Hamilton tickets today, even if the secondary market was invisible to the average theatregoer in those pre-internet days. It’s important to remember how celebrated Cats was in its day, because as its 18 year run wore on, the show began to be perceived as a bit less groundbreaking and perhaps somewhat timeworn. For all of its enormous commercial success, its penetration into the popular consciousness and successful tapping of both the family and tourist markets, its then unprecedented run ultimately yielded jokes about the show having outlived its nine lives. The parade of animals that opened Julie Taymor’s production of The Lion King for Disney became the new standard for anthropomorphised animals on Broadway; the two shows overlapped for almost three years in New York.

While Chicago returned to Broadway in a production that echoed the Bob Fosse-directed original, it isn’t the same staging; no doubt the show benefited from a hiatus of some 20 years. Conversely, Les Misérables came back to Broadway for the first time only three years after the original run closed, in the same production, and lasted just 15 months. The Cats revival has the benefit of being gone from Broadway for almost 16 years, but it’s largely the same show (save for some new choreography and lighting). It remains to be seen whether ticket buyers embrace the show that may well have been their very first time at the theatre, seizing an opportunity to take their children to an experience they once loved as children, or whether the iconic production might have needed a full rethink for the digital era, for a generation raised on The Lion King and Wicked.

I have to confess that I am rather uniquely unqualified to hazard a guess as to what the fate of the Cats revival may be. Why? Are you sitting down? Because I’ve never seen it. Despite avid theatregoing that began in the late 1970s, I never did manage to see Cats on Broadway, on tour or even in a high school auditorium. I was already a collegiate theatre snob when the show opened, and, without children of my own nagging me to take them as the run continued, I never felt the feline lure of T.S. Eliot or Andrew Lloyd Webber during the ensuing two decades. When I worked on the US premiere of By Jeeves in the mid-1990s, I always feared Lloyd Webber turning to me and saying, “Do you remember that moment in Cats when…?” I would have been left sputtering for a response.

That’s not to say I don’t have a strong impression of the show, since numbers were performed in full on television back in the day, excerpted for Broadway histories and television ads alike, parodied frequently, and so on. The TV sitcom Caroline in the City featured an actor character who was – fictionally – a member of the Cats menagerie. It was such a cultural touchstone that I remember The New York Times critic Frank Rich panning a show I did press for, about illegal dog fighting (no animals were harmed), with a withering, “Anyone for Cats?”

Come next week at this time, I will no longer be a Cats virgin. Whatever I make of it, inevitably my response cannot be one of youthful wonder nor middle-aged nostalgia. The question for the producers is whether there are enough people out there who want to evoke one or the other of those sentiments, among the already initiated or those born too late to experience the original run. As much as I plan to watch the show at long last, I’ll be keeping an eye on the audience as well, to see who turns out for the reconstituted Cats, if not now and forever, than at least once and again.

“I have a guy.”

I used to hear this phrase a lot, from various people not in the theatre industry, who always seemed to be able to acquire tickets to sold-out Broadway shows with ease. I don’t hear it so much anymore, because now everybody has a guy, whether ‘he’ goes by the name of StubHub or Ticketmaster Fan-to-Fan resale or something along those lines.

In 2007, when New York State lifted caps on the amount that ticket resellers could charge over face value, long-standing opposition from the commercial theatre community had gone silent. Only six years after The Producers had introduced ‘VIP’ or ‘premium’ pricing, using the argument that these higher priced tickets would make it possible for productions and artists to realise more income via direct sales, most shows followed suit, with their sales success directly correlated to audience demand. Resellers jumped into the fray, more openly than ever before. But now, with the rise of automated bots that gobble up tickets for sale online, it seems to be getting even harder for the average ticket buyer to acquire seats at something close to a reasonable price, even from the official ticket outlet, in the already expensive Broadway arena, if they can get them at all.

In “Why Can’t New Yorkers Get Tickets?,” a report issued last week by the state attorney general, the results of which surprised no one familiar with what’s been generally evident for some time, it was affirmed that a combination of preferred sales that limited the number of seats actually made available to the public, along with mass acquisition of tickets by bots, were biting into ticket inventory in a big way. While there are laws in New York against the use of bots by resellers, and a few fines have been levied, it’s going to take a lot more scrutiny to police such sales. As it seems in so many aspects of modern life, the people determined to get a leg up on everyone else, even when their actions are criminal, seem to be further ahead of the technology curve than those chasing them.

Theatre is not alone in this struggle; the same holds true for rock concerts and sporting events. But any given theatre is so much smaller than those venues that the problem seems more pronounced, as does the heightened demand that drives prices up, a situation most apparent today with Hamilton, which is enjoying demand that’s comparable to those experienced, in my theatregoing life, by, among others, Cats, Phantom, Les Miserables, Miss Saigon, the 1992 Guys and Dolls revival, Rent, Jersey Boys and The Book of Mormon.

So this isn’t a new story, even if it has been turbocharged by technology and made more apparent by the rise of online sales. It’s based in the fundamentals of supply and demand. Some theatre buffs might feel some small sense of pride that theatre is able to generate this kind of interest and desire. But in the process, it only emphasises how expensive theatregoing can be, even when only a few shows command eye-popping prices on the open market.

Broadway is a predominantly commercial enterprise, so it’s unlikely that capitalistic efforts will ever return ticket sales to something close to accessible for the majority; the real battle is over who gets their hands on the most significant part of the revenues being generated. However, just as dynamic pricing spread from the commercial realm to subsidised companies, one can’t help but wonder what’s happening when celebrities appear in regional houses, or when 200-seat theatres such as New York Theatre Workshop start selling tickets to Othello with David Oyelowo and Daniel Craig in the leads this fall. While NYTW made an effort to limit resales during its run of Lazarus by requiring photo ID to pick up seats, that will only go so far.

As someone who was extremely surprised when the commercial theatre industry ended its opposition to resale caps almost a decade ago, I certainly applaud efforts to put all ticket buyers on a level playing field and stem the tide of unbridled price hikes, both official and illicit. At a time when income inequality continues to divide America in so many things, it’s a worthy effort, though I fear a losing battle which has probably already had an insidious and deleterious effect on the perception of theatregoing as an entertainment option for all, even beyond the confines of Manhattan.

Somehow, some way, people with the means to do so will manage to get the tickets they want, when they want. They will always have a guy, even if their guy is now a silicon chip.

This essay originally appeared in The Stage.

Les Misérables at Lakeshore Collegiate (Photo by Darren Calabrese for The Globe and Mail)

If you haven’t been reading Toronto’s The Globe and Mail every weekend this summer, then you likely haven’t come across J. Kelly Nestruck’s terrific series in which he followed a single high school theatre production of a non-musical adaptation of Les Misérables from start to finish.

It no doubt benefited the youthful-looking Nestruck that he would stand out vastly less among a gaggle of high schoolers than say, me, and it appears to have allowed him unfettered access to the process, the logistics and the emotions that are part of any theatrical production, let alone one in a high school. While Kelly wasn’t undercover at Lakeshore Collegiate Institute, I like to imagine his series as the journalistic equivalent of Cameron Crowe’s original book Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but one set entirely in the drama group.

Because I write so often about crises and conflict in high school theatre, I found Kelly’s series essential, not solely because of one part’s focus on what is “appropriate” for a high school production. It is in my memory the most sustained piece of major mainstream newspaper reporting on high school theatre since Jesse Green wrote about the field for The New York Times in “The Supersizing of the School Play” back in 2005. But Nestruck’s series goes vastly farther than Green’s article in its depth.

Since I am not given to aggregating content, I’d prefer to think of what follows merely as an index, with excerpts that in no way give a full sense of the range of the complete articles and the stories they tell, in the hope that you’ll use this post as a guide to the Globe and Mail’s entire series. (The headline of each section will take you to each separate article.) I think for anyone who cares about theatre – not just high school theatre, but the entire field and it’s future – it’s a must-read.

It’s also my way of asking Kelly to take a bow.

*   *   *

Part 1: A quest to re-discover the magic of theatre, starting in a high-school drama studio

Last fall, approaching my seventh anniversary at the newspaper, I was in crisis about the art form that I had loved since I, myself, was a teenager.

Watching plays at Stratford, or in Toronto, or in Calgary upwards of 200 times a year, I had begun to worry about what I was seeing in the seats around me and on the stages in front of me.

I worried I was writing about an art form still dominated by white directors and playwrights and performers in a country that increasingly was not.

I worried that theatre was becoming an elitist art form whose major institutions were increasingly out of reach of even the middle class, that the core theatre audience was staying white and getting older – and that my profession was swiftly becoming as idiosyncratic and outdated as a mechanic for penny farthings.

Most worrisome of all: I began to lose faith that theatre was worth fighting for. I wondered if the “magic” I had always ascribed to live performance just was a myth I had bought into, and whether more complex and better-told stories – ones that reflect and engage with and interrogate the country and the world we live in – could actually be found on Netflix for a fraction of the cost.

Part 2: Finding a role that fits, on stage and in life

Drama teacher Greg Danakas settles behind a small desk, while 25 students from Grade 10 to 12 gather around him in a circle on the floor. “Let’s read this frikkin’ play!” he says – and you’d never guess the Tim Hortons coffee in front of him was decaffeinated.

“Is anyone Instagramming this?” asks Bradley Plesa, the Grade 12 student who will be playing prisoner-on-the-run Jean Valjean.

Listening to these kids immerse themselves in their characters for the first time, it’s clear how much work – and learning – is ahead of them.

The students pause every page or so as Mr. Danakas defines words such as “cleric” or “consumption” or explains a historical event referenced in the play, like the July Revolution. “It’s a French revolution, not the French Revolution,” Mr. D says – a recurring refrain for the rest of rehearsals.

It’s also clear, however, that Lakeshore’s acting students are up for the challenge. (Unlike me – I reluctantly declined Mr. Danakas’s kind offer to play author Victor Hugo in his dystopian production of the play.)

Part 3: Student actors learn the art of paying your dues

It’s easier for some students at Lakeshore Drama to pay dues than others. Lakeshore, a high school located in south Etobicoke, is not only representative of Toronto’s cultural diversity – but also the city’s economic diversity.

Allan Easton, the school’s new principal, explained the catchment area to me one day over a surprisingly delicious lunch prepared by the culinary-arts students. In the 1980s, Lakeshore was formed by the amalgamation of three schools – an academic-oriented school in a higher-income area, a technical school in a more blue-collar neighbourhood and a third in the centre that was what Mr. Easton calls a “classic public school catering to whoever.”

The demographics of the school still reflect that mix: There are students who live near the water and come from families with incomes that may be significantly six figures, and there are students who live to the east in Toronto public housing. That class disparity is often apparent in the Les Misérables cast – one student contributes to discussions of the play by talking about what she learned on a trip to France, while another shares his experiences growing up in foster care like Cosette.

Many have part-time jobs they struggle to balance with rehearsals – but that hold different importance from person to person. Certain students are saving up to go to expensive universities abroad; others are earning money to help out at home.

Part 4: Censor and sensibility: What’s appropriate for a middle-school matinee?

Mr. Danakas’s most popular production to date was a stage adaptation of Dracula inspired by the 1998 Wesley Snipes movie Blade. It featured 17 vampires who were – in Mr. D’s words – “dressed like prostitutes,” watching the action unfold from scaffolding.

Dracula sold out Lakeshore’s 600-seat auditorium all three nights it played in 2005 – and Kathleen McCabe, the principal then, wrote Mr. D to praise him.

“I am sure that producing a high school play may have limited your true creativity because of the censoring that I imposed on you,” she wrote in the letter, which Mr. D has framed and hung on his office wall. “However, you were able to design an amazing play and keep it on the edge.”

Times have changed, however – and now it’s Mr. Danakas who has to censor himself. “I wouldn’t be able to do Dracula now,” he says with a sigh.

The drama teacher is continuing to deal with fallout from his relatively tame, gender-bending Three Musketeers from last year.

Mr. Danakas had d’Artagnan – who wants to join the Musketeers – played by a female student and decided to deal with the implications of dropping a woman into the jocular world of 17th-century French swordsmen.

Athos, Portho and Artemis gradually gained respect for d’Artagnan, but they behaved chauvinistically toward her in the early scenes. “I thought it was totally harmless, juvenile silliness,” Mr. D says.

That’s not what a couple of local middle-school teachers thought of the groping and crude gestures with épées, however. They pulled their classes out of a matinee due to the sexual slapstick.

Part 5: Set up to fail? Less drama in schools could hurt theatre industry

As opening night of Les Misérables gets closer and closer, more and more people become involved beyond Mr. Danakas’s Acting Class – and more and more elements move outside of his direct control. Cosmetology students are working on the hair and make-up; business students are planning front-of-house operations; and the after-school sewing club is making long, black skirts for all the young women to wear in Mr. D’s non-musical, dystopian take on Victor Hugo’s classic tale.

On top of that, Timothy O’Hare, Lakeshore’s shop teacher, runs an entire for-credit class devoted to the design and construction of the set. I pop by the Toronto high school one morning in early May to see them at work. Instead, I find a handful of students studying or on their phones under the supervision of a substitute teacher, while a documentary about the history of sneakers plays unwatched.

Mr. O’Hare – who is much-loved by his students and doesn’t seem to mind his nickname “Mr. No Hair” – is away with much of the class at the Ontario Technological Skills Competitions. Grade 11 students Lamisa Hasan, Nicholas Latincic and Shamar Shepherd – who all had to stay behind for various reasons – happily leave the doc behind to talk to me about how they collectively designed and built the Les Misérables set.

Part 6: Tale of the red tape: Even in high school, bureaucracy can frustrate art

Allan Easton, the patient and good-humoured new principal at Lakeshore, walks me through some of what is holding up Mr. Danakas’s production. The worry about the fog machine is that it will set off the smoke detectors. The detectors could be bypassed, but then staff would have to be paid to walk around and look for fires – $1,200 in overtime for three nights.

Painting the floor, meanwhile, could be a problem because it might impinge on the skilled trades. “I can’t ever be seen to be taking a union job away from anybody,” Easton explains.

Health and safety concerns also complicate Les Misérables. I remember climbing up on ladders to help hang and focus the lights in my high school auditorium, but Lakeshore’s 1950s-built catwalks are off-limits to all (teachers aren’t even supposed to get up on a ladder, so an adult volunteer did that work on borrowed scaffolding). “Even our caretakers have to have ladder training before they can use a ladder safely,” Easton says. “We’re a very litigious society now.”

As for budgeting, Mr. Danakas used to roughly estimate his ticket revenue, but now sales have to be carefully projected. “ ‘It should be fine,’ isn’t something I can go with any more,” Easton says, with a sympathetic shrug. “Accountability is huge – more than it was in the past. … Taxpayers’ money, right?”

Part 7: Masters of the house: The payoff that makes the gruelling weeks of drama worthwhile

Even at Les Misérables though, it’s clear different audience members want different things. There’s Caroline Buchanan, for instance, described to me as the ultimate drama mom. Not only is her daughter, Samantha Dodds, playing Madame Thénardier, but her partner, Jim Ellis – a 60-year-old management consultant and part-time voice-over artist – has been conscripted to play the role of Victor Hugo.

Ms. Buchanan was one of the first in line to make sure she got good seats – and was primed for a moving experience. “I don’t know why, but it’s very emotional for me,” she says. “There’s so much lead-up – and you see what they all go through. And now it’s here.”

Sara and Alexander Plesa, Bradley and Samantha’s parents, are more skeptical about theatre in general. “I’ll be completely honest, where I’m not the ‘drama mom’ is that school comes first, grades come first and this comes last,” says Ms. Plesa, who works in a civilian role for the Toronto Police and affectionately calls her kids “drama brats.” “I’ll fight with Bradley to the end of time on that – and Mr. Danakas.”

But the Plesas have had a number of personal setbacks over the past year, with Mr. Plesa’s cancer diagnosis, cruelly, coming just as he was on the verge of being hired by the police. Their children’s performances tonight have surprised them – particularly boisterous Bradley’s deeply centred Jean Valjean.

“You wouldn’t know that their life has been the way it has been [lately] by watching that,” Ms. Plesa says. “It’s almost flooring to me: Is that my son?”

Part 8: Exit stage left: Lakeshore Collegiate’s drama students take a final bow

I came to Lakeshore with a naive point of view. I really did want to renew my faith in theatre after becoming frustrated with professional theatre in this country – and rediscover the joy of theatre I had felt as a high school student myself. But you only get to be a teenager once. And what I found when I looked at high school drama through an adult critic’s eyes were things I hadn’t noticed the first time around. I found an acting class that wasn’t fully representative of the racial diversity of its school, and that it was easier for students from certain economic classes to participate than it was for others.

I found a high school theatre with less money and less audience than it used to have, and more hoops to jump through, set up by administrators and unions. I found bureaucracy and I found self-censorship – and I found art’s value being sold with the language of business.

But what I ultimately discovered at Lakeshore is that the dissatisfaction that I’ve been feeling about the professional Canadian theatre I cover as a critic isn’t really about theatre at all, but about the wider society that theatre exists in and reflects. If theatre and democracy have indeed been linked since ancient Greece, then it makes sense that theatre would suffer from the same problems as our democracy – which is also unfair and bureaucratic and filled with leaders who speak to taxpayers instead of citizens.

*   *   *

Again, bravo to everyone – the teachers, the students, the administrators, the parents and the reporter. Bravo.

All excerpts from the series High School Drama by J. Kelly Nestruck from The Globe and Mail, originally appearing between July 3 and August 21, 2015.

Howard Sherman is director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at the New School for Performing Arts.