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For senior Ivan Marquez, his school’s spring musical feels like a dream come true.
Marquez wanted to do theater when he came to John F. Kennedy High School as a freshman. But since there was no program, he joined the choir instead. Now, three years later, he has a lead part in “Mamma Mia!” and has been rehearsing after school and on Saturdays.
“Knowing what’s happening to the school, I feel like that’s just pushing us to work harder,” Marquez said, “so that the school can continue to be open for the future students.”
This week’s production of “Mamma Mia!” is happening at a difficult time for Kennedy High, located in southwest Denver. The school is one of four that could face closure under a new Denver Public Schools policy that calls for shuttering schools with persistently low state ratings.
But a closure wouldn’t happen until next spring. And the students at Kennedy said they aren’t giving up.
“‘Mamma Mia!’ is kind of giving the school a little hope, because you’re seeing everything start to get revived,” said Heaven Tafoya, a senior who’s on the student board of education.
The last time Kennedy put on a musical was nearly a decade ago. Back then, the school had 1,000 students, which was not enough to fill its 1,500-seat auditorium but more than the 675 it has today. Theater teacher Kristen Martin had to rope off the back half of the auditorium in order to push the audience toward the stage for a play the students did in the fall.
Martin, whom everyone calls KMart, was hired last year by Principal Victoria Wyatt to restart Kennedy’s theater program. She said she arrived to find that the school was storing its gym mats in the theater department’s prop shop, and her office was full of computers.
The first thing she did was recruit five students from the school’s overflowing art classes who’d expressed an interest in theater. Their job was to help her physically dig the program out.
“I found kids who wanted to be here, and I made sure they wanted to be here by putting them to work,” said Martin, who previously worked in the Aurora and Littleton school districts.
But while five students was enough to put on a few showcases last spring and “The Odd Couple” in the fall, it wasn’t enough for a spring musical. Vocal music teacher Julia Wirth said she knew that to make a musical work, she’d have to pull in her choir students.
Junior Aspen MacDonnell remembers the pitch: Instead of a spring concert, Wirth told the choir they’d be part of the musical instead. And if they wanted a big part, they’d have to audition.
Not everyone was thrilled. Most of the students had never heard of “Mamma Mia!,” a jukebox musical featuring songs by the Swedish pop group ABBA about a bride-to-be who invites three men from her mother’s past to her wedding on a Greek island. ABBA was popular in the 1970s and “Mamma Mia!” premiered in 1999, before the students were born.
“Some people were feeling like they were forced,” MacDonnell said of the auditions, “but once we got into it, I feel like everybody loves it.”
Sophomore Brihani Posas said being cast in “Mamma Mia!” made her feel like a missing crayon who’d finally found her box. Tori Southworth, also a sophomore, said she’s heartbroken to think that she might lose her new friendships if the school were to close.
“I think ‘Mamma Mia!’ has really shown that we can still fix this,” Southworth said.
Any closure decision will likely hinge on academic factors like the school’s PSAT scores and graduation rate, not on the strength of its performing arts or athletics programs. But those are often the things that make a school feel successful. Students and staff can tick off a list of Kennedy’s recent accomplishments, including that its girls basketball team won the city league championship this winter and its JROTC team is competing at nationals.
“In the broader school, it is a lot of tension and fear,” said social studies teacher Kade Orlandini, who helped build the sets for “Mamma Mia!” “I feel like the musical is trying to show we’re not dead yet, and hopefully we won’t be. There’s still a lot of great things happening at Kennedy.”
On a recent call with a reporter, Wyatt, the principal, held the phone up to the school’s loudspeaker. There on the morning announcements were the students who’d never before put on a musical, singing to the whole school to encourage them to buy tickets. The cast has also been making video clips, one of which has more than 70,000 likes on Instagram.
“Take a chance on meeeeee,” the students sang on the morning announcements, “and join us in the auditorium on Friday and Saturday at 6 p.m.”
“Our kids are pretty relentless,” Wyatt said.
In that auditorium earlier this week, students dressed as Greek tourists sat in the front row, sharing a box of McDonald’s fries before a dress rehearsal. A girl and two boys mimed choreography between bites. A kid on the technical crew frantically looked for AAA batteries. The sound of a backstage vocal warmup was muffled by thick stage curtains.
By 5:30 on the dot, the dinner break was over and everyone was in place. The lights went down, and a medley of ABBA songs came streaming through the speakers.
Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.