Jude Magnotti 26’
EE Staff Writer
Ninety schools, hundreds of plays, thousands of actors, all of this amounting to one climactic ceremony in Waterbury!
This past Wednesday, the theater students at Trumbull High School took a trip up to the Seven Angels Theater to participate in this year’s annual Halo Award ceremony.
The Halo Awards are designed as a specialty award show to recognize high schools and students alike for their incredible work on theater productions across Connecticut. There are over 47 different categories recognizing everything from the best actors in a play, to the best stage managers in a musical.
This year in particular, our Trumbull High school theater program was up for over thirteen different awards for the production of our fall play The Alibis and our spring musical Mean Girls.
Just the previous year, our program took home a menagerie of awards for their productions of 42nd Street and Almost Maine including Best Musical as well as Best Actress in a Musical.
While not nearly as massive as an award show such as the Sondheim’s, the Halo Awards serve as an important way to reward students and directors alike for all the hard work they put into their theater productions year after year.
As for the ceremony itself, the gala is one of the most electric events that the students will participate in all year. Every member gets dressed up in their Sunday best and the anxiety and tension of waiting for an award to be announced with your friends is simply incredible. In addition to the awards itself, each high school puts on a segment or scene from one of their musicals to perform to the other schools.
This year, Trumbull put on a segment of “It Roars” from their spring production of Mean Girls. While having to change from suits to sundresses within a matter of minutes is certainly difficult, performing on a stage as grand and illustrious as the Palace Theater makes it well worth it.
This year’s Fall show, The Alibis, was a murder mystery comedy based around the murder of billionaire J.Leslie Arlington. As detective Casey Neptune slowly unraveled the clues from the spider web, more and more suspects turned out to have been off committing separate ridiculous crimes at the time of the murder! Just as all the evidence fell into place, it was revealed that billionaire J. Leslie Arlington was never dead and he uses the blackmail from the investigation to manipulate the others into joining his crime family as well as killing Detective Neptune.
The Alibis received rave reviews from students and teachers alike with one teacher Mrs. Hope Spalla even goes as far as to say, “It was the most fabulous play I have ever seen!”.
As for the musical, Mean Girls followed the story of new kid Cady Heron as she explored the wild and untamed landscape that is high school. After she is recruited by an A-list clique in The Plastics (led by queen bee Regina George), she begins plotting to take Regina down for good.
As Cady’s plans backfire on her, she slowly begins to learn the value of friendship and the individual beauty within every person. As the musical ends, all the students come together to celebrate their individual worth and realize that they are all stars!
Mean Girls was also received positively with their performances of Nora Watson as Regina George, Irene Yezersky as Cady Heron, and Talia Cook as Karen Smith being noted as major highlights.
Still, the individual success of each of these shows is anything but a surprise. Theater has long had an important place in Trumbull High School’s culture and the students go above and beyond with their performances not just for the recognition that comes with it, but for their overall love and passion for the stage.
Still though, it does feel good to win and that’s exactly what Trumbull High School did at The Halo Awards this past Wednesday. The program took home three separate awards: Best Student Directors in a play for The Alibis, Best Featured Dancers in a musical for Luka Hatzis and Nick Ferreira, and Best Leading Actress in a contemporary musical for Irene Yezersky.
While the program did lose out on ten other separate nominations, Trumbull theater still maintains its reputation as being one of the best schools in Connecticut for shaping young performers. No matter how many awards they win, or how many categories they are nominated for, students will continue to pursue their love of performance with Trumbull High for years to come. Besides, there will be plenty of time for even more award winning soon enough…