Lake Forest Academy is a treasure trove of stories - stories carried in by students from around the world, stories accumulated over decades of school history, and each day as our students learn and grow, new stories are written. Musical Theatre is an art form in which many disciplines - acting, singing, dancing, design, composition, writing - come together to tell stories in their own way. With such a fertile ground for storytelling and so many gifted and ambitious students, it seems inevitable that LFA would eventually produce a full-length student-written musical. In our mission to center students in the art-making process, we invited several student writers to compose a new story and assemble a score from stories and sounds both global and ancient. Tonight we celebrate the depth and breadth of LFA culture with a World Premiere event.
Our writing team began over the summer considering what trickster figures - complicated and often misunderstood - could be thrust into a school setting on a mission with human consequences. Many were considered, from Sun Wukong to Anansi to Coyote, until a crack team of mythological figures were assembled to engage with a heartfelt tale of contemporary teen life. The electronic music you’ll hear tonight was composed for the occasion, the set and costume designs and choreography blossomed from our student’s fecund imaginations, and our eclectic sung score spans many countries and genres.
Writing our own musical is certainly not the easiest way to put on a show, and pandemic-related challenges only raised the difficulty level, but Caxys are not the kind to back down from a challenge. In creating a show from scratch, students got a first-hand view of how Musical Theatre comes together, how music functions in a lyric theatre context, and how the fine arts and production elements marry with writing and interpretive arts to tell a story that’s never been told before.
Tonight we celebrate imagination, learning, determination, hard work, art, and craft. To crib the late Stephen Sondheim, we’ve “made a hat where there never was a hat”, and we invite you to enjoy a brand new story told by a special group of young artists as only they can tell it.
