History Mystery opens in a typical study hall where students ask the time-honored question: "Why study history?" What follows is anything-but-boring as TADA Youth Theater's Executive and Artistic Director Janine Nina Trevens delivers a power-packed and candid punch of a script. With rousing and diverse music and lyrics by Eric Rockwell and Margaret Rose, Trevens, who also directed the musical, leads the multi-talented cast of young actors to some uplifting conclusions about history and, er, herstory.
Myth-Busting Production
This play holds up a mirror to the conventional approach in textbooks and does not shy away from confronting them. Why do students find classroom history boring? It's about white people and there is no diversity. History Mystery artfully improves on the same-old narrative through the skillful manipulation of digital projections and other scenic elements to simulate time travel. Projection Designer Norman Franklin and Scenic and Lighting Designer Steve O'Shea have crafted an artful world that immerses everyone in the story, whose soup-to-nuts highlights include the Civil Rights and Women's Rights Movements and the U.S. Internment Camps of World War II.
The production moves cunningly through the signal locations of important American moments --Philadelphia, the Kansas Prairie, Kitty Hawk, New York City, Atlanta, Washington, DC, and California --offering beautiful archival footage to cue the audience to the look of each period. TADA's black box theater offers high production values and a generously deep stage to accommodate Joanna Greer's cunning choreography.
Comedy with Music
The emphasis lands on imagination and daring to dream, and the production employs high and low comedy to keep the multigenerational audience engaged. Offstage, a two-man band -- Jim Colleran, the Resident Musical Director, on keyboards and Ray Grappone supplying the percussion -- underscores the energy of the show.
A generous mix of historical personages, including everyone from Orville and Wilbur Wright, to Laura Ingalls, Ben Franklin, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, populate the cast along with Suffragettes and students who become motivated to learn. Judging from the audience's response, the lesson to schools is clear -- learning should be fun and engaging. As the characters ask, almost tongue in cheek, "What could kids playing have to do with history?" The subject also gains a greater connection to reality in such touching moments as the very young Martin Luther King, Jr. complaining about his mom: "I hate it when she calls me by my full name."
Trevens' script has the generous capacity to see a glass of water half full. In reflecting on the Japanese-American Internment, for example, Ana reflects on the happy coincidence of her grandparents' meeting at one such camp. A profound lesson for the student of history concerns the ability to think beyond black and white characters, and this play carries it home. Study hall will never be the same as freedom covers every wall.
TADA Resident Youth Ensemble
This award-winning youth development program offers completely free pre-professional training to 80 Ensemble Members in the New York City area. All members must audition to join, and they perform in mainstage shows, at area schools, as well as City events. In addition to theater arts training and performance opportunities, the group mentors students in college preparation.
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