Drama teens take Broadway

On a trip to Manhattan, 14 students get a taste of big-time theater

NEW YORK -- Behold America's theater capital, twinkling, preening, clanging, stoking ambitions and devouring tourist dollars.

Now behold the 14 drama students from Verdugo Hills High School in suburban Los Angeles, on a five-day blitz of Broadway shows and Manhattan landmarks. Their teacher-chaperones, John Lawler and Katherine Morrison, march them through Times Square to a late dinner.

Bright lights, big city, no parents.

"It was beautiful!" Joshua Archer, 16, writes in his journal that first night. "The city was flawless with lights, billboards and the smell of fossil fuel!"

This is a rite of tourism: your first Broadway show, your first circuit of Manhattan landmarks, your first chance to reconcile the real metropolis with the one you've read about and seen in so many pictures.

But things may have changed since you did it.

Now, an undiscounted Broadway ticket routinely costs $110. Four of every five audience members are tourists. Little Italy is increasingly Chinese. Chinatown is increasingly Vietnamese. And Times Square is increasingly sleaze-free.

The kids are different, too. Instead of films such as "West Side Story," "Breakfast at Tiffany's" or Woody Allen's "Manhattan," this group's idea of New York mostly comes from "Law & Order," "Sex and the City," "Rent" and the New York street on the Universal Studios tour.

"Something washed over me, and I connected to the spirit of the city," 16-year-old Sara Saavedra writes of the first night. "I sat in Virgil's BBQ a different person."

And that's before seeing any shows.

The next afternoon, after a prowl through the Museum of Modern Art and a stand-up lunch from a hot dog cart on Fifth Avenue, they file into a matinee performance of "Young Frankenstein."

Most of these students have just put on a three-day run of the musical "Footloose," so they're not just watching the gags and songs; they're noticing the spotlight operator, the choreography, the effects.

They exit the theater grinning. Megan Mullally's singing, the monster's soft-shoe dancing, the 34-year-old movie jokes by Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder, the deafening effects -- the whole daffy, glossy package works for them.

On the sidewalk afterward, Chrissa Villanueva, 17, spots the actor who plays Igor and has a picture taken with him. Annie Welch, 15, gets an autograph from the Village Idiot. Sarah Stone, also 15, gets one too, along with a pen, a "Young Frankenstein" soundtrack CD and a "Please Don't Touch Me" T-shirt.

To raise the $1,600-per-person cost of this trip, these teens held a carwash, a rummage sale and a bake sale, cajoled their parents and counted heavily on Lawler to work school district funding sources.

In New York, they sleep three or four to a hotel room (in the tidy, efficient Wingate by Wyndham on West 35th Street). They travel by foot or subway, rely on the free hotel buffet for breakfast and eat a lot of hot dogs and pizza. Using group rates, they're paying about $50 each for their show tickets.

Their chaperones have lived and worked in New York, so they know the subways, the theaters and a lot of theater people. By today's standards, it's a pretty cheap trip.

Day 2: A real 'Awakening'

The kids hit the Drama Book Shop, a longtime stagefolk hangout. Chrissa, who is wearing green fishnet stockings and purple shoes tonight, reaches for monologues for women. Dylan Smith, 17, her boyfriend, peruses the monologues for men. Others climb to the loft to paw through musical scores, half-singing to themselves.

Then comes "Spring Awakening," which won eight Tony Awards last year. Adapted from an 1891 play, the show is a coming-of-age story steeped in passion, wit, death, regret and crashing electric guitars.