Curtain Time! Coop Kids Come To Shubert’s Aid

“Some guys just can’t hold their arsenic.”

Cooperative High School junior Briana Brooks ​’s boyfriend learns that the hard way, when she poisons him after discovering that he had six wives on the side.

Fortunately, that takes place onstage, not in real life — just one out of more than a dozen acts from the Shubert’s Sunday night show ​“Making a Classic – Cabaret 2010” – a production put on almost entirely by high school students, to help out the theater up the street.

“This is it, guys,” said 17-year-old Briana Bellinger (pictured above) as she stood in front of the cast during a dress rehearsal on Friday. ​“The show’s in two days.”

Bellinger, a senior at the Cooperative High School of Arts & Humanities, was the brains behind the entire operation. She chose the songs. She held the auditions, She did the choreography. She directed.

And she made it happen at the Shubert. ​“Yesterday we were running through the dressing rooms yelling, ​‘We’re professionals!’” she said\. ​“I dreamed of it, I didn’t think it would happen, and now it’s happening.” 

Including the band (pictured), the running crew, and the singers and dancers, that’s a group of more than 50 people. Most are Coop students; some are from other neighboring schools.

A close partnership between the Shubert and Coop developed out of a complete coincidence: Last April, it turned out that both facilities would be putting on the show ​“Jesus Christ Superstar.” So the Shubert arranged for the cast of the professional show – which included Ted Neely, who starred in the 1973 movie version – to meet the high school cast. The school and the theater are less than a block away from each other on College Street.

“You might say that it was an act of God,” joked Anthony Lupinacci, director of marketing and public relations for the Shubert. The professional cast even walked over to Coop’s theater shortly before the show to wish them luck.

Shortly after that, Coop students and staff found out the city was considering cutting funding to the Shubert. (City dollars make up a large portion of the budget for the theater; the city owns the building.) So Coop ¬¬theater teacher Rob Esposito sent three of his students, including Bellinger, to an aldermanic Finance Committee meeting to testify on the Shubert’s behalf.

“She was great. She wowed them a lot better than I could because she’s young and passionate,” said Shubert’s Executive Director John Fisher said of the meeting.

“She has it. She’s got it,” said Esposito of his student. ​“And it’s not just the artistic ability, it’s the ability to do all the other stuff and get other kids to follow you.” Bellinger has been dancing for 16 years, and acting and singing for nine. She plans to attend auditions for Broadway in New York at the end of March.

A few weeks after the Finance Committee meeting, Bellinger participated in a summer arts program at Wesleyan called Center for Creative Youth, or which students receive school credit for upon completion. CCY’s final project requires students to bring their art form back to their community, and as Bellinger puts it, ​“we did a really giant one.” After hours of pouring through songbooks in the Wesleyan library, putting up flyers all over the greater New Haven area for cast members, and auditioning about 60 people for 38 performer spots, ​“Making a Classic – Cabaret 2010” was born. All the proceeds from the show will go to the Shubert.

“[A funding cut] could have closed this place for good,” said Chris Franci, a junior at Coop. ​“We were actually able to help a little bit.”

“A lot,” clarified Lupinacci.

Along with many other students from Coop and other high schools – as well as a few elementary and middle-school aged kids – Franci has balancing his school day and homework with several hours of rehearsing each day.

“You just wake up, you go to school, you come here, you go home, and then you go to sleep,” said Coop junior Ivonnie Rivera. Participating in high school musicals usually comes with the promise of a ​“hell week” – for this production, it’s ​“hell month.”

But none of them would trade it for anything. ​“We don’t do this because we have to do it,” said Suheys Rodriguez, a freshman at Gateway Community College. ​“We do this because we love to do it.”