Dan and I chat about being in high school musicals and plays in the US vs the UK 🙂
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46 Comments
I went to an all boys grammar school. Selective secondary school for the non brits, or even the brits who don't know what one is!
If you did drama it was presumed you're gay
Oh yayyy I wasn’t expecting to see Dan here (I literally only know him from NRB Blood on the Clocktower games lol)
I grew up doing drama in France, and I went to uni in the UK and US so this has always been a fascinating topic to me because of the different types of drama kids it builds. In France, most schools don’t have a drama club except maybe in high school – teachers might still orchestrate productions but then usually you have to be part of it whether or not you want to. Most people who do theatre do it at a “conservatoire” outside of school, where the standards are usually quite high but you take classes instead of being involved in productions, which is quite a big difference in terms of relationship to the craft. We also had 0 budget for our showings, and had to do everything ourselves (no costume team, no crew…) In many ways, I feel like I have less experience with competitiveness, auditions and actual “productions” than my UK and US counterparts, but I also feel my theatre education before university was somewhat more rigorous.
Coming from a very big high school theatre department in Maryland, Evan’s experience is pretty close to ours. The only thing different is that our pit orchestra was all high school kids (and yes they were usually from the marching band). The students did EVERYTHING except direct, which makes sense since we were there every single day. It really taught me a lot beyond just acting, and it was such a great way to make friends. It’s an underrated extracurricular for kids even if they aren’t into performing.
Nativity/Christmas plays are becoming a thing of the past in British schools now because of " inclusion of other faiths " !
No " year books", " extra credit " in the UK.
" Used to sing choir" !?
I went to school in the UK in the 60s/70s. We never had drama club, plays, Nativity plays etc.
"Finished school at 2pm" !!
Wait- u know Patty Walters?! Love his stuff. Small world!
I didn't know Americans don't do nativity plays, interesting. Don't you do Thanksgiving pageants though? That's basically the same thing culturally.
8:47 when I was at school we were forced to do drama until year 9. I hated it 😭
Great vid – goes without saying BUT…
I’m here to call out how brilliant that ad was done. The acting – on point (including the non-speaking parts), but the effort that must have gone into making that dialogue flow so naturally back and forth with yourself, was top tier.
And the script – from the funny way to slide into it, to the “hey there’s only 10 seconds left” breaking the 4th wall type thing – genius. Loved it.
They certainly got their money’s worth from you with that solo production.
Im from Warrington aswell, and the high school I went to was actually quite good for drama. The hall for performances and plays was pretty big (had the chairs that go higher every row, might have been an auditorium idk). The 2 drama teachers we had were really good. I also went to a drama club, I dropped out tho because I lost interest. So it's still pretty good up here I'd say. (Responding to 21:00)
Why did I love the ad 😂
So at my school (US, but in GA) we still had the auditorium and pit band like you had in NJ, but with high school band students mostly, maybe with a few local music teachers or teachers that had some involvement with music in the community (church, community band, private instrumental instruction, etc.). But due to funding cuts, the pit sadly didn't include any orchestral strings. Daniel is right on about the marching band/concert band to pit pipeline, at least in my experience.
I was in uk state comprehensives for Primary we had the Junior play you did in year 3 and Senior play in year 6 which were part of our curriculum, and then in secondary there was an extra curricular musical with an unauditioned chorus every year which was always a bit extra like we had a semi-professional orchestra . You also had inter school competitions and showcases like the one act Shakespeare festival. Seems it varies wildly from school to school.
Evan, I am from Wyoming, and I feel like you read my mind. Yes, my experience was more like Dan's.
Daniel, a lot of American high schools built after say 1990 have large auditoria and separate theatre space. My own high school was built in 1988 and I started two years after. Below the theatre was the music/theatre department with rehearsal space and classrooms. Evan's high school theatre is actually slightly larger than mine but that's accurate.
Our theatre also had a pit, but it was a proper pit, sunken before the stage and the lowest level of the auditorium. But unless Evan's musicals, ours were made up of the music students (because our school was that large-ish — we had 2,000 students, but that's not the biggest in the county, and there are now several schools with more now).
We had no pool, Daniel, but we had multiple fields. And we used a local swim club for our swim team (that has a fall/winter collapsible bubble for year round swimming.)
These vids jsyt make ne think my school was underfunded like when did we get the memo abt getting to do plays.
so how big was it????????
This is wild to me because I went to a tiny school in regional Australia. We had “drama class” in primary school and did school assemblies. But nothing in high school. If you wanted to do any actual drama/acting, you went to the community theatre. Usually with a bunch of old people as well.
I went to a (state) school in the UK that was specifically signed off as a specialist performing arts school (still a normal school, just extra funding for our performing arts department), so we did have a fancy auditorium and stage etc. Our school orchestra did the music for shows and our music teacher conducted. It was a big deal to be in the show because you got multiple days off lessons for the final rehearsals. We also sent our orchestra and choirs to play/sing in Europe. I'm sure other schools did this too, but I'm discovering it's not quite the norm I had assumed it was.
Several people who were at my school (not my friends) went on to act on the West End, one was on the tv show where they competed for a role, I can't remember which role.
Would love to see a British v American video on election systems in both countries (maybe next March or Nov, or Jan 2025 if parliament keeps delaying their election). As an American living in the UK I was so surprised how national elections are called by parliament and not just every few years. I would avoid politics but bringing attention to the differences would be interesting. Also, I think it would be a good reminder for Americans living abroad that if they are still paying taxes then they definitely should still vote!
Evan,can I come round your flat,get you in an arm lock,fling you to the floor in a half nelson then shear off all your long hair with rusty scissors. No,oh,thought not. You look like the Cat in The Hat. But then you might with short hair too. I sound like I was cryogenically frozen in the 1960s and just woke up. I once saw a school production of Les Mis and it was brilliant. It was Colfes school in South east London,my friend whose son had recently left there for uni,took me there to see it.
Our school hired a barricade for our production of les mis (in the uk). we also made sets out of scaffolding that a company had to come in and set up. We got to climb on some big tower scaffolds when we were doing a midsummer night's dream. Don't know where the heck we got the budget from though.
My sixth form experience at a private school was much more like Dan's though – not much staging and using things that were already in the props cupboard.
I loved this video Evan, good job also the ad at the end was hilarious
I love the comparisons of the two theaters! We had a gym with a full stage, which feels like it’s halfway between the ones shown
not all private schools in the UK are public schools! It's only some of the older and more prestigious private schools that were originally boys-only (some of them are now co-ed to a greater or lesser extent), and mostly originally boarding schools
Is the West End similar to Broadway?
Did any other americans do the Revolutionary War musical in elementary school? We did it in like 4th grade I think. I remember the Boston Tea party song was like "one lump or two? How do you take your tea? Just one way will do, at the bottom of the sea!"
I'm from England and my upper school had an auditorium (very surprising as it was a shithole). Also, my primary school had a swimming pool. Which I don't think was super uncommon in the 80s/90s (though many of them fell out of use later as they were expensive to upkeep)
From the UK and went to a school with very average productions. Most of the plays were done by people in drama GCSE or A-level and pretty much no one else cared. And the music was just a CD player, no musicians involved at all lol. Would have been cool to be more involved, though. I would have loved to do stage design or something!
Being the stutterer, in 2nd grade, I had to pretend I was a tree and say nothing at all. Basically, I felt like Harry who is says about his part in the evening festivities, "I'll just go upstairs and make no noise and pretend I don't exist." I was furious. The next year at that school, they decided to do the Nativity, but the 'actors' simply stood there facing the front of the church, reading Bible verses and the cast, simply stood around the pews singing. Again, I was furious, but choose to be a singer as I only wanted to do a tiny bit of actual acting and say 1 word that wasn't an H word.
Fast forward to different school – High school where only those who were pro actors could get a part. Even a 7th grader was pulled so that I wouldn't get a part in the play. Many many many years later I realised that Drama and Dancing was meant to only be done by those who were naturally gifted and that you were banned from 'trying it out' because they only got funding from those tickets, so had to be extremely good. I also learned that with my brain randomly showing up, (something I didn't know I had as a kid) that I wouldn't be a good last choice on stage, I was SO over the top bad! Today I am thankful that they choose a 7th grader. OTOH, I still think that teacher was very very racist. He was also a person who couldn't keep his pants on. I wonder if ever learned how to stay married. I had loads of respect for him back in the day, but now I have none.
Fast forward to now – I would never ever do a Purim play even. I learned that I can not remember my lines, act and remember my marks at the same time. I won't do a Purim play where the whole point is bad acting! OTOH, I wish I had a different childhood where you are allowed to try different things and actually be respected instead of hated.
In primary my year group put on a performance at the local theatre (I think we did Matilda the musical?), they also helped us put on the production, so I think I had quite a unique experience compared to a lot of British people. We got to tour where they were building the sets for west end shows etc, full tour of the theatre itself, go into the dressing rooms, work with professionals. I genuinely think it’s why I love the arts now.
Ironically, I went to an all-girls' school which also didn't teach home economics because a previous headteacher (I think maybe in the 90s?) had decided it was "too girly" and therefore disempowering! Textiles, I believe had also suffered the same fate, and only been reintroduced a few years before I started.
The school did start doing food tech when I was in year 9 – but my year group weren't allowed because "there was no point us starting so late" or something??
So in primary school we had a drama club that you had to audition for and they did 1 play a year in the summer and it was ALWAYS Shakespeare. So I have vivid memories of being 10 years old and having to learn all my lines to Midsummer Night’s Dream as Hermia. Now I look back and think who came up with this craziness because the lines were soooooo difficult 😭
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Part 2 of the webinar : "All about input and output"
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In my primary school everyone every year got involved with different plays. We had the pied piper, Rockerfella and all kinds! It was usually for Christmas but not Christmas related. — And that continued in high school, where we still did Christmas plays every year but it was stuff like legally blonde, grease etc! And for sixth formers, they would have to write their own script and perform their own play for charity week near Christmas! Those were always hilarious since it was based on fairytale stories and popular characters as well as the top 10 songs of the year. I remember the gangnam style and what does the fox say featuring once 🤣 especially when the Santas reindeer stole the Christmas wish star so Santa couldn’t deliver presents to everyone! And they jumped into different fairytale books like Alice in wonderland trying to find the star that was stolen and hidden! 🤣 dude, the sixth formers every year were so creative, they had like a 12 person writing team for the script every year to make the best script possible. Those were the golden times. Our school even recorded them and you could buy the CDs of those performances. (Sadly I was too poor for that lmfao.)
American vs ENGLISH not UK.
Private school education is not the norm for the most of the UK
My school was so tiny that we struggled to get people to join Drama Club and teachers to oversee it. We did our plays in the commons of our high school, except for the one time we went somewhere else. Then, my Junior year, many of the people experienced in making sure drama club ran smoothly left or graduated, there was about 4 willing actors, which diminished to about 2 people as the year went on, and the club kinda just fell apart. We didn't produce a play after that, which was sad, but it's the way it goes sometimes.
My experience is somewhere between you two: we had a dedicated auditorium and stage crew made sets (though on a budget) & such, but if a band was needed, whatever band students were available had to do it
i was blessed enough to go to a school in england that has its own theatre and leisure centre, its a PA and sport school, even some of the classrooms had stage pieces you could put together and lighting rigs and stuff, so we'd often have small touring shows come in to the school and perform and sometimes they would involve the students and be classed as student productions, with the PA and music teachers choreographing a play that an actual company had written (like Robin Hood and Footloose) so the students got to work with professional actors and actresses. I was a drama student so could audition if i wanted to but my anxiety got in the way (and i failed my drama gcse too, naturally. I wanted to do the more technical side of it cause i thought the school would offer that since we are fortunate enough to have the technology
edit: by pa and sport school i don't mean its a private school or anything, it just has 'specialist status' as an arts school.
It has the facilities therefore it attracts a lot of students who like that stuff and converts a lot of students to those subjects and just generally has bit more funding for those areas, with some talented people having gone there e.g. Dele Alli
My school (UK) didn’t put on plays 😢 I feel like if they had, I would have been a theatre kid
School I went to had a stage and room behind’s was a boy’s changing room and to get on stage for School Eisteddfod you had to walk in thought boys changing rooms then get in your place. It involvements was mandatory except for year 11s at time and it included people in your house colours included majority of staff at the school as well. It involved acting,dancing, singing and improv. It was a Welsh medium Secondary school. Unfortunately I still remember it. When it was my group’s turns. Yes some did solos as well.
The "Sing Hosannah to the King (of Kings)" is so true 🤣
From Wyoming, 20:49 is spot on.
A guy I went to school with has been pretty regularly in the West End. He is the most talented person I've ever known so I'm very glad that it's happening for him.
What i found interestion was the no religion in school when my daughter attended kindergarten in usa when the usa is uber religious and we had hymns and religion i uk and most of us are atheists