Summer Stock Goes to the Movies With How to Musical Theatre

A scene from How to Musical Theatre, the new movie musical from Summer Stock Austin (Courtesy of Summer Stock Austin)

Say the word "musical" and you automatically think either "Broadway" or "MGM." Since its founding in 2005, youth theatre group Summer Stock Austin has given hundreds of young performers and technicians their moment in some of the Great White Way's finest titles. This weekend, the nonprofit lights up the silver screen as a throwback to the glory days of On the Town and Anchors Away with How to Musical Theatre, a movie homage debuting in a special fundraising screening for Pease Park Conservancy.

Written and produced by Emmy winners Damon Brown and Allen Robertson (known to a generation of kids as Tiny Scarecrow and Buford Biscuit from beloved PBS series The Biscuit Brothers), it follows Marvin (Wilkes Goodner) into a Technicolor place where the rules of musicals apply. Fortunately, he has Kelly (Morgan Lewis), O'Connor (Noah Wood), and Reynold (Alyssa Hurtado) to help him get adjusted – and yes, those names are a nod to Gene, Donald, and Debbie, the stars of Singin' in the Rain.

The jump to film is part of two years of change at Summer Stock, which has become, alongside professional development program the Texas Arts Project and the Heller Awards for Young Artists, part of the newly founded Impact Arts. The intention of the organization is to set young Austinites on a path to a career in musical theatre, and Impact Arts co-founder Donalven Thigpen (himself a Summer Stock alum) said that the movie is just opening another door. He said, "So many musicals are being made into films, it's so cool for the kids to be able to see that, 'Oh, I can still use this skill set.'"

In 2020, like much of the theatre world, Summer Stock went online with Cyber Stock: a selection of short films created by the 40 students who were supposed to do Summer Stock that year, topped and tailed by musical numbers by J. Quinton Johnson. "That was our first jump to digital," said Summer Stock founder and Impact Arts co-founder and Artistic Director Ginger Morris. The pandemic had eased enough in 2021 that the troupe was able to return to live performance with a production of Lin-Manuel Miranda's Bring It On: The Musical at the McCullough Theatre on the UT campus, but they'd got the filmmaking bug. Across last summer they made Scout, an original movie musical written by Brown and Robertson. Morris credited Robertson with suggesting movie musicals back in 2018 "but I went, 'When would we do that? We present three live shows every summer, we can't possibly add a movie musical.' Then the pandemic hit, and I went, 'How about a movie musical?'"

Morris credited Brown and Robertson with walking the theatre folks through the filmmaking process, and one smash premiere screening at the Bass Concert Hall, nine film festivals, and five awards later, the Summer Stock team decided that Scout shouldn't be a one-off. So this year, rather than three live shows, they would do two live shows and another movie. The stage productions – Alice's Wonderland (a newly commissioned work by Johnson) and In the Heights – just wrapped up successful runs at the McCullough, but with How to Musical Theatre the performers will actually get to be in their own audience, seeing the song-and-dance routine in that magical MGM style of long takes and wide angles that put the performance first. That way, Thigpen said, "you get to feel the whole number."

How to Musical Theatre world premiere Aug. 14, 7:30pm (season donor and VIP pre-reception 6:30pm) at Pease Park, 1100 Kingsbury. Free. RSVP at impactarts.org.