high school musical

'High School Musical' Takes Center Stage at O'Connell

By Gretchen R. Crowe
HERALD Staff Writer
(From the Issue of 4/5/07)

ARLINGTON — On the heels of Disney’s made-for-TV movie “High School Musical,” students from Bishop O’Connell High School in Arlington performed the play by the same name to four sold-out audiences in the school’s auditorium during the last two weekends in March. The movie, an unexpected hit for Disney — who due to its extreme popularity released the film on DVD last year — has become a cult favorite with tweens and teens.
It is particularly fitting for O’Connell to present “High School Musical,” as school alumnus Bryan Louiselle arranged, produced and adapted music for the film’s stage version.
Louiselle attended the fourth and final performance of the show, directed by “E.” H. Milam,
last Friday, and his presence put the icing on a three-tiered Disney-coated cake of inspiration for the O’Connell students and their audiences.
“High School Musical” is all about peer inspiration. Students learn to reach beyond their comfort zones to develop into the people they are supposed to become, regardless of which click they might initially be lumped into. Basketball jock Troy (Keefer Font) and math whiz Gabriella (Kyla McKenna) lead the way when, after meeting each other, leave their usual circles and audition for their high school’s annual spring musical. This unprecedented action ends up uniting the entire school, from “brainiacs” to “skater dudes” to “jocks,” allowing everyone to be “all in this together,” as proclaimed in the finale. It’s a story of peer motivation — of two students inspiring each other and then reaching out and, without really meaning to, inspiring their classmates.
Taking their cues from Troy and Gabriella, the O’Connell performers found themselves inspiring elementary and middle schoolers — some perhaps future O’Connell students — who clamored in the lobby after the play to get autographs from the stars only a few years older than themselves. To the younger audience members, those older high schoolers were living, breathing representations of their own opportunity, possibility and potential, no matter which path they might choose to follow.
And the high schoolers, for their part, could look up to Louiselle, who, as a talented, successful alumnus of their own high school, represents their own potential.
“I think the kids derive an awful lot of inspiration from him,” said Principal Dick Martin, who called Louiselle a “natural talent” even from his freshman year at O’Connell. Since his graduation, he moved to New York to compose music for numerous films and plays, conduct and arrange for Radio City Music Hall and, most recently, work as the resident music supervisor for Musical Theatre International/Disney Kids & Jr. For Louiselle to come back to the school where he developed his love for the arts is a big deal, Martin said.
Louiselle said he has seen 10 productions of “High School Musical” in schools across the country, but to see the show in his own high school was really “sensational.”
“It looked like they were having fun and I hope they were,” he said.
So, beginning with song and dance and ending with New York success, the story of peer inspiration truly came to life last weekend at O’Connell — all through its high school musical.

Gretchen R. Crowe can be reached at gcrowe@catholicherald.com.