The Lisa Stevens story has “local girl makes good” written all over it. Frustrated by a lack of opportunity here, the Vancouver dancer and choreographer lands a London audition for Chicago, with no less a legend than Ann Reinking (longtime lover of the show’s creator, Bob Fosse) casting Stevens in a West End production.
That’s followed by a role in Bombay Dreams, and it isn’t long before Stevens has stepped into the role of choreographing the U.S. tour of that snappy Bollywood-style musical. She has done everything from crafting a show for cruise ships to appearing in the film version of Phantom of the Opera, but these days there’s no time for anything but one concern.
“I hadn’t really heard of High School Musical,” Stevens says in a phone interview from her home north of New York. “I thought they meant a high-school musical, and it was a little confusing — when did they start producing high-school productions?”
They” were her friends at Theater of the Stars in Atlanta. With the resounding success of Disney’s television production of High School Musical, the entertainment giant started out by licensing the show to schools, before deciding to up the ante and release it to five professional houses in the U.S.
Theater of the Stars at Atlanta’s Fox Theater happened to have hired Stevens to choreograph the Bombay Dreams tour, and decided she was the one to tackle their version of High School Musical.
“Disney fell in love with our production and decided to take that one on the road,” Stevens says. “It ended up being the definitive template for all future shows.”
Thanks to Disney’s sharp skills in marketing its TV version of High School Musical, the stage production is quickly becoming an international phenomenon. Long before a North American tour reaches Vancouver next week, a tour of the United Kingdom generated the biggest pre-sales ever seen in Britain, and Stevens now finds herself in constant motion around the world.
“There’s a company in Spain and another in Italy,” she says. “The director and I just came back from England and Australia — we’re creating another company in the U.K. to sit down in the West End for a limited run, and we were in Sydney and Melbourne to audition for a new Australian company.”
When Stevens started her search for the first production in Atlanta, not a lot of musical-theatre actors knew what High School Musical was.
“Now they’re lined up out the door,” she says. “Even in the U.K. and Australia they come in and sing songs from the show, they know all the words, all the harmonies. It’s a phenomenon — I think it’s this generation’s Grease.”
Whatever the language it’s being sung in, none of the productions of High School Musical are far removed from the all-American ethos of the original.
“Once you take it out of that world,” says Stevens, “it becomes something different than the children know. I haven’t seen the Spanish production but I heard it’s culturally appropriate in terms of how it’s acted. It’s very gregarious, a little more flamboyant, so it reflects the local culture — but none of the dialogue or characters have changed.”
For more go to source
