Three schools in Whitfield County, along with the Artistic Civic Theatre (ACT) in Dalton, may have to make some room in their trophy cases following the 2024 Junior Theater Festival in Atlanta.
The annual festival, which was from Jan. 12-14 this year, featured 6,500 theater students from around the world. Students from Westside Middle School, North Whitfield Middle School, Northwest Whitfield High School and the ACT brought home awards.
Sponsored by iTheatrics and Music Theatre International, the festival is “an international festival that takes place several places around the world, but Atlanta is the biggest,” said Ashlyn Barnett, North Whitfield Middle’s musical theater teacher. “It’s a place where Broadway Junior shows and the students who put on those shows are celebrated.”
While Broadway is thought to be the “big theater that everyone thinks about, (they) only reach people who can go to New York and see them,” said Barnett.
“Broadway Junior shows are shows that people in our schools and communities can see, so it’s a way for them to come together with other kids and celebrate what they do to bring the arts, theater and all of these different stories to their communities,” she said.
During the festival, students perform a 15-minute excerpt from a Broadway Junior show and are judged by a panel of musical theater experts.
Twenty-six students from North Whitfield Middle performed a piece from “Into the Woods Junior,” 15 students representing the ACT performed “The Lion King Junior” and 15 students from both Westside Middle and Northwest Whitfield High performed “High School Musical Junior.”
After three days of rehearsing, workshopping and performing, the ACT group received an excellence in music award, said Director Kate Phinney.
Westside Middle’s troupe received an award for excellence in ensemble, while the group from North Whitfield Middle received an award for excellence in music.
Four students from Whitfield County were deemed all-star performers: eighth-grader Bentley Roach and seventh-grader Kinsley Whaley from North Whitfield Middle School, Charlie Bolton from Westside Middle and Ella Rose from Northwest Whitfield High.
Northwest Whitfield High senior Patricia Ridley was awarded a trophy for student directing, and Olivia Akers, who “studies at the University of West Georgia and is a Northwest (Whitfield) High and Westside (Middle) alum, won the all-star tech award,” said Westside Middle’s theater teacher Jennifier Akers.
Overall, 128 troupes were represented, with 30 from Georgia and the rest from other countries, including Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
“As a first-timer, waiting to go up in front of all of those people was very nerve-wracking, but once we got started I kind of eased into it,” said Whaley, who played the role of the baker’s wife in the “Into the Woods Junior” production. “As soon as it was over, all of that (nervousness) left.”
Olivia Williams, a seventh-grader from North Whitfield Middle, said students had the opportunity to participate in acting and dancing workshops, where they “experienced new ways to present emotions and how to show that with your body language.”
Roach, who played opposite Whaley in the role of the baker, said he was surprised to hear their names as all-stars.
“After everyone gets adjudicated on Saturday evening, they pick two people from each group,” he said. “I didn’t think I was going to get it, but then they screamed out my name and Kinsley’s name. It was shocking. When we got on the bus that night, (Barnett) handed us our all-star medals.”
The 2024 edition of the festival marked seventh-grade student Bo Owen’s second time competing. During the summer, Owen traveled to New York City to take part in the 2023 iTheatrics Summer Academy, where students are given the opportunity to experience the different facets that go into making a musical, including set design and music.
“We actually got to hear a song performed from the summer workshop that he did with iTheatrics,” said Barnett.
“When I heard that and found out that it was up for licensing to go on Broadway, I was surprised,” Owen said. “I’m just so happy.”
This year’s festival was a first for eighth-grader Kyra Parks. A hard of hearing student, Parks narrated her troupe’s performance by using American Sign Language while fellow student Clair Douglas spoke the words.
“(Going into it) I thought it was going to be more of a challenge because of me being hard of hearing,” Parks said. “I thought that people might see me in a different way when I started doing it, but everyone was so supportive. I’m glad I got to do it this year and I’m looking forward to doing it next year, because it was really fun.”
If you were to ask students and audience members who “stole the show,” some would point to Andy Toth, a sign language interpreter for Whitfield County Schools.
Toth, who took part in the festival for the first time, signed the performances for Parks and others along with another outside interpreter. This included both interpreters signing an entire concert from Adam and Arielle Jacobs, a famous brother and sister Broadway duo as they performed songs from Disney Broadway classics such as “Aladdin.”
“We were all watching (Toth) because he was putting on such a great performance,” Barnett said. “I posted a picture of him online and all the comments were ‘We watched him the whole concert; he was incredible.’ You have two Broadway stars on the stage, but all of the eyes were on him to see what he was doing because he was putting so much into it.”
Toth, who was homeschooled growing up, said the festival was an opportunity to reignite his passion for theater.
“I love theater and love the work these kids do, so having the opportunity to go was great,” he said. “It was so much fun to be a part of and to see how awesome these kids are. I was never really in theater (classes), but I’m definitely a theater kid at heart and this experience just pulled all of that back out of me.”
Toth said the real stars are the students.
“One of the reasons I wanted to go was so I could see more of these kids and their awesome talents,” he said. “It’s really cool how we can just spread this throughout our community and get them involved.”