With its 60th anniversary just around the bend, the high school musical theatre competition SING! can look back on an illustrious history that has nurtured the talents of performers such as Neil Diamond, Barbra Streisand, Neil Sedaka and Paul Simon of Simon and Garfunkel.
Established in 1947 by Mrs. Bella Tillis, a music teacher at Midwood High School in Brooklyn, SING! is an annual student-run event hosted by some high schools in the New York City area. It is a breeding ground for actors, singers, dancers, musicians, designers, directors and choreographers – in other words, almost anyone with an affinity for the arts.
The longevity of SING! has been sustained by a diverse talent pool that also includes singer Janis Siegel of Manhattan Transfer; actor, author and stand-up comedian Paul Reiser; and Oscar-winning actor, screenwriter, producer and director Tim Robbins.
SING!’s role in cultivating students’ artistic gifts is certainly part of what has made it so successful, and those who participated in it have gone on to not only span artistic genres but also straddle the high/popular culture divide. On the side of high culture there is Pulitzer Prize-winning classical music composer John Corigliano.
“Mrs. Tillis was one of the few steadfast and believing voices who from early on had encouraged my musical ambitions,” said Corigliano, who wrote the oratorio A Dylan Thomas Trilogy for her. “She was my teacher and an extraordinary person.”
Another Midwood High School alumnus is novelist, poet, playwright and non-fiction essayist Edward Patterson. Also a performer at the Ridgewood Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company, Patterson sang the lead tenor role in The Pirates of Penzance with the Charles Pope Singers at the age of sixteen after coming under Mrs. Tillis’s guidance and enrolling in the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music.
But SING!’s success isn’t solely due to its cultivating of students’ artistic flair. One of the reasons students enjoy it so much is because it builds a sense of community within the school.
“SING! is the one thing that brings everyone together,” explained Tottenville High School’s senior SING! director Jen Carbonella. “It’s a healthy competition between the grades and, most of all, the best place to make memories that we’re going to keep with us even after we leave Tottenville.”
It is also credited with helping disadvantaged or marginalized students re-engage with their peers nad their studies. An increasing body of work on the value of the arts to school children and academic success would seem to support that notion – and another way SING! was ahead of its time.
Other schools to have hosted SING! include Simon’s Forest Hills High School, Siegel’s James Madison High School, Robbin and Reiser’s Stuyvesant High School and Streisand and Diamond’s Erasmus High School. All except Erasmus High School are still doing SING! productions.
SING!’s profile reached its peak in the mass media in 1989, when a movie based on it was released, relating the story of a group of Brooklyn teens who put on a musical in a last-ditch attempt to save their school and their drug-overrun community.
A cross between Footloose and Fame (all three films shared the same lyricist, Dean Pitchford), Sing is reminiscent of the string of Rooney-Garland “Let’s put on a show!” musicals of the 1930s and 1940s. Composer Richard Baskin’s directorial debut wasn’t a hit with all the critics, but it did hit a nostalgic nerve with some old SING! contestants.
“This movie is a great movie and yet doesn’t do it justice,” said Kim Burch, the leader of Sheepshead Bay High School’s SING! productions from 1988 to 1992. “The hours and hours of hard work during school, after school, weekends…But in the end it was well worth it. I miss my high school years and the best part of them was SING!.”
So now that Reiser and Robbins, the youngest of the SING! contestants to have achieved artistic success, are nearing 50, what does the future hold for SING!? Of course, its survival shouldn’t have to depend on its ability to churn out new performers, but those in charge don’t always place “engagement with the arts” at the top of their list of priorities for students. The Bronx High School of Science’s SING! program, for example, was cancelled in 1994 as a result of an accident that occurred during a SING! meeting without teacher supervision.
“Galasso, who was the principal then, said that he was outraged that we had a meeting without teacher supervision, and that something awful could have happened,” recalled Earl Maneein, whose fingernails were ripped off by a spring when a fellow student jumped off a cafeteria tray holder that he had been wheeling him around on. “As a result, he was revoking SING!’s charter, and we couldn’t put on the play that year. Somehow, no one seemed to mind…”
Might it be a case of not knowing of you’ve got till it’s gone? Certainly, students who never had the chance to participate in a SING! seem envious of older peers who did.
“My sister had trophies for SING!,” said Lisa from Long Island. “I always wanted to prove to her that I could do it, too, but when I came into her grade, the program was dead and long gone.”
Still, SING!’s future isn’t bleak by any means; it was recently reinstated at the Bronx High School of Science, and still takes place in many schools around the state. And if we sit tight for long enough, a new generation of luminaries might find their footing.
