Hillhouse Theater Returns With ​“BKLYN”

“It’s good to be back. Today is very special for us because two and a half year ago, today was our last day,” said Ty Scurry, who runs the Academic Theater Company, the drama club based out of Hillhouse High School, as the cast prepared to do a full run-through of its upcoming production, BKLYN, which will run at the school’s auditorium from May 12 to May 14.

By that, Scurry was referring to the program’s previous production of The Wiz, which was scheduled to have its run in March 2020. After months of preparation, the run was cancelled due to Covid while the actors were in dress rehearsal. ​“We were one week from opening, so today would have been the day that we got the call that we can’t come back.”

Scurry kept in touch with the students after the shutdown, and watched as ​“the seniors left, and then the juniors who became seniors also left. It was difficult to keep the program afloat. So this year I chose a very small show. But it actually worked in our favor,” he said. ​“For our first year back, I’m not totally mad at it. We’ve called it the rebuilding year. Everything that we do is dipped in creating a legacy, for the program and for the school. It’s our mission and our mantra.”

Scurry had a few ideas for a small show that he and the cast could do well. He thought of Anything Goes, but wondered if ​“kids would come out for it.” Then he thought he might pull a ​“Salvatore De Lucia,” he said. De Lucia runs Lights Up, the drama program at Wilbur Cross, and still serves as an enthusiastic mentor to Scurry. Scurry thought of how, for that program’s rebuilding year in 2018, he picked a relatively unknown piece with a small cast.

“Mr. De Lucia has been such an inspiration and a help during this process, because he’s been around the block a few times,” Scurry said. ​“I’m constantly asking him how things work.… It’s good to have that kind of support in the district, especially when you had them as a teacher.”

Scurry got to work scrolling through publishing sites, looking for rights. He thought of doing James and the Giant Peach for a minute. Then ​“I was on Instagram posting for the drama club, and this show popped up from 2001.” It was a clip of ​“Once Upon a Time,” one of the songs from BKLYN. ​“Lo and behold, I found this gem of a musical.”

BKLYN, by Mark Schoenfeld and Barri McPherson, tells the story of Brooklyn (Regina Santana), an orphan in Paris who grows up to be a talented singer and travels to New York as a young adult to look for her long-lost father. As she establishes herself, she finds herself in a rivalry with New York-based singer Paradice (Janae Branham). As the rivalry intensifies, Brooklyn is able to leverage her growing fame to possibly find her father and discover why it was that he abandoned her in France years ago. If the story sounds like a bit of a fantasia, it is; in the reality of the show, the story is actually being performed by five homeless people on a single block on Flatbush Avenue.

“What a great idea for a show,” Scurry thought. ​“It’s just five people on a street corner, performing, having fun.” The underlying seriousness of the scenario, however, satisfied another criterion for him as well. ​“My big thing is to do a show that has a little meaning to it,” he said. ​“All the people performing are homeless, and they’re probably performing for their next meal.” For Scurry and the cast, it was an opportunity to learn about what it is to be homeless, to struggle with addiction, and about ​“how to portray that without making it a farce. So that’s been a challenge, learning about that, but it has made them better human beings. That’s my big thing — making the students not just better actors, better performers, but better human beings.”

Scurry also knew that the show had made it to Broadway but ​“didn’t do so well” there. He learned that the show had been staged more as a fantasy, ​“and I think that caught people off guard.” By contrast, ​“we’re presenting it in a very literal way,” one that lets the audience see through the fantasy the performers are creating, and thus puts them there, on the same city block.

Having made that decision, ​“the set was a puzzle to me to figure out how to make it work, and we made it work,” Scurry said. Tim Kane, a teacher at Hillhouse who serves as Academic Theater Company’s faculty advisor, built much of it. A couple streetlights were borrowed from another theater program. The phone booth onstage is borrowed from Wilbur Cross High School’s theater club, Lights Up, from its production of Sister Act, in which Scurry played when he was a senior there.

The result of Scurry and his team’s work is a lean and effective production of a musical that, it turns out, has some startlingly good songs, by turns fun and somber, rousing and reflective. The cast of five is more than up to the task of conveying both the fantasy the performers are creating and the reality that they live in, so that the audiences is transported and brought back to earth. As Faith, Brooklyn’s mother, Makaila Matta anchors the play in pathos, even as she returns again and again. As Taylor Collins, Brooklyn’s father, John Marchand embodies a quiet desperation. Carlie Mathews excels as the Street Singer — a kind of guide through the shifting landscape of the play — thanks to a commanding stage presence and even more commanding voice. Janae Branham fully inhabits Paradice, letting us see the vulnerability beneath the braggadocio. And Regina Santana carries the weight as Brooklyn, giving the character’s sadness and innocence a survivor’s edge.

That sense of survival inhabits the play both inside and out. Just before the cast ran its dress rehearsal, Scurry asked them to do it not for themselves or for the audience, but for the two years’ worth of Hillhouse students whom the pandemic prevented from performing. Echoing the themes in the play itself, Academic Theater Company’s production of BKLYN is a poignant reminder of the way so many lives have been scattered during the pandemic, and the way artistic endeavors like these can help put the pieces back together.

BKLYN runs at Hillhouse High School from May 12 to May 14. Visit the drama club’s website for tickets, showtimes, and more information.