By Maddie Orton
Arts Correspondent
The Tonys may be Sunday, but for New Jersey’s high schoolers, the big awards show of the week was Tuesday night: Paper Mill Playhouse’s 20th Annual Rising Star Awards.
“It means the world to have incredible recognition from such a renowned theater like the Paper Mill Playhouse,” says Keenan Buckley, a Lead Actor nominee from Summit High School.
Judges see about 100 high school musicals across the state and nominate a handful of students and educators for awards in performance, design, direction, tech and more. The ceremony concludes, just like the Tonys, with the award for best musical, or in this case, “Outstanding Overall Production.”
“The students look forward to this all year long,” says James Mosser, director of Theater at Union High School. “We spend hours and hours of rehearsal time, so this is sort of the prize at the end of the whole process.”
Making it all the more exciting for young theater fans, Rising Star Awards (and subsequent Paper Mill conservatory scholarships for a select few) helped launch the careers of big names like Anne Hathaway, TV and Broadway’s Laura Benanti, Tony-winner for The Book of Mormon Nikki M. James and Tony-nominee for Chaplin Rob McClure. Many of the award’s alums came back to present.
McClure met his best friend, Matt Scott, at his first Rising Star Awards. They went on to tie for Lead Actor award his senior year.
“He was the moment I learned just how small a fish I was in the big pond of things,” McClure says of Scott. “Because it’s easy in your hometown to think you’re the best, and then you show up to the Rising Star Awards, and that’s one of the great things that it does. It exposes these kids to, not competition, but to their community.”
Surrounded by soldiers and peasants and cats and flappers, they’ve all got one thing in common — they’re all theater people. The students say their high school musical experiences have taught them how to be team players, to feel empathy through characters and to build a work ethic. But, they all say the big takeaway is that they learned they’re part of this broader community.
“I think the number one thing I learned was that there was a place for me,” says Nikki M. James. “I found my people.”
The Rising Star Awards may be over, but for scholarship recipients, the journey has just begun. Conservatory classes start at the end of June.