The Broadway for Teens program gives 40 students and five chaperones from up to six schools across the states a trip to see a full-fledged performance, and earlier this week, representatives from the program surprised students at Rio Grande High School with an in-class announcement that they had been selected. This year’s show will be Clue at Popejoy on November 6th.
Rio Grande High School teacher Caitlin Reardon showed her students some of her acting skills when she broke the surprise — she told them members of the press were evaluators sitting in on her lecture to conduct a teaching observation. When she started the “observation” with a video saying their class was selected to take a trip to the University of New Mexico’s campus to watch Clue, she paused the video, shouted, “SURPRISE” and the students erupted into a roar of laughter and applause.
Fabianna Borghese-Tabeling, Director of Popejoy Hall says the theater’s mission is to provide access to the performing arts for all New Mexicans. She says Broadway for Teens helps them reach communities that they don’t normally get a chance to.
“Maybe they’re too far away or it’s just not something the family would normally do,” Borghese-Tabling says. “Our hope is that it makes them fall in love with theater.”
Borghese-Tabeling says she’s happy to see a resurgence in appreciation for the performing arts, especially in the wake of the COVID pandemic, when government restrictions closed theater doors to the public across the nation.
“We were deprived of it for a long time and kind of have a new appreciation for it,” she says. “I think there’s a lot of people that don’t take it for granted anymore.”
Funding for the program is made possible by Popejoy’s Excellence Endowment, which supports future programming, operations and education. Borghese-Tabeling says it is from the generosity of the community that Popejoy can do a program like this. Her dream is to be able to book an entire performance one day.
“That would be bringing in almost 2000 students to see a show like Hamilton or Wicked, one of those big shows,” she says. “But we can’t do that without some help from donors and other supporters.”