Co-Op High School | Culture & Community | Education & Youth | Arts & Culture | Shubert Theatre
Top: Arianna Ellison, a junior at Cooperate Arts & Humanities High School, with Mean Girls production manager Kathleen Carragee. Contributed Photo. Bottom: Lilly Mennone, a fourth grader at Grove J. Tuttle Elementary School in East Haven. Lucy Gellman Photo.
When fourth grader Lilly Mennone walked into the Shubert Theatre, she wasn’t expecting that a musical would feed her love for herpetology one number at a time. But by the time she had walked out, she had a new understanding of what science could look and feel like—and a sense of the possibilities that awaited her beyond the classroom.
Forty-eight hours later, high school junior Arianna Ellison slipped on a pink t-shirt, stepped into the Shubert’s mezzanine seats, and caught a glimpse of her future life as a stage manager. She couldn’t have known it then, but by the end of the week, she’d be one connection closer to her dream job, and watching it play out backstage.
Those revelations—for two different students, in two different grades, over two very different performances—rocked the Shubert last week, as Ada Twist, Scientist & Friends and Mean Girls rolled into the downtown theater two days apart. As they soared from STEAM learning to apex predators, both showed how the performing arts can open up a space for possibility, particularly in a world that tells women and girls what they can and cannot be.
That began on Tuesday morning, as Lilly joined over 1,000 students at the Shubert for a student matinee performance of Ada Twist, a TheaterWorks USA musical based on the children's books of the same name. Two days later—almost to the hour—it continued at a tech breakfast, as Ellison and her classmates watched the load-in for Mean Girls, then met the real-live production stage manager for the show. By Friday, Ellison was backstage with her, watching her call cues in real time.
Lucy Gellman Photo.
“Seeing it from a new perspective really altered things, and honestly it was a beautiful experience,” said Ellison, a junior at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School who wants to do tech theater professionally. “I was talking to the stage managers, I was talking to the run crew, and it was really, really amazing to be able to get all of the perspectives of everyone.”
The timing could not be more critical. As the Shubert grows its educational footprint, New Haven Public Schools Superintendent Madeline Negrón has continued to discuss the potential layoffs of 29 arts educators, part of a larger plan to reduce budget shortfalls with the reduction of student-facing staff. If it goes through, programs like these will become even more critical in bringing the arts to students, whose schools are also under attack on the federal level.
Lessons From Ada Twist
Kalilah Black, Kyle Sherman, Daisy Carnelia and Jenna Perez in a touring production of Ada Twist, Scientist & Friends. The current cast, of which TheaterWorks has no photos, includes Gaby Moseley, Katie Kallay, Jackson Wells and Karis Knierim. TheaterWorks USA Photo.
When Lilly woke up on Tuesday, she didn’t know that a musical was—at least a little bit—about to change how she thought about her future in science. She bid farewell to her terrarium, which holds darkling beetles, mealworms, spiders, and millipedes. She boarded a school bus, traveling from Tuttle School in East Haven to the buildings and restaurants that line College Street downtown.
By 10 a.m., she was among the pint-sized masses spilling onto the sidewalk, their voices a steady hum over College Street. Between them, they hailed from schools across New Haven, East Haven, and Hamden, many already focused on Ada Twist because they have been reading some version of the book in school.
In addition to the beloved picture book by Andrea Beaty and David Roberts, there is a series of chapter books, such as Ada Twist and the Disappearing Dogs and Ada Twist And The Perilous Pants. Tuesday, every student in the audience received a copy of the latter, thanks to a gift from tech manufacturer ASML. While ASML provided books to every member of the audience, Jordan’s Furniture supported the student matinee.
In addition to 1,064 students, most from Title I schools, 101 teachers attended.
Lucy Gellman Photo.
At the theater’s wide, heavy front doors and in the lobby, students marvelled at the space, with its high ceilings and wide, chatter-filled lobby. With the precision of air traffic controllers, ushers pointed school groups toward the theater, some motioning to the stairs that led to the mezzanine and balcony. In a group from ACES Wintergreen Magnet School, 10-year-old Elliott Williams seemed to vibrate with anticipation, ready for the show.
“I’m pretty excited,” he said. Earlier this year, his class did an experiment with gummy bears, submerging them in different liquids to figure out how they react to acids (vinegar), sugars (juice), and that magical bonding of H2O that is water. So when he heard that a bunch of young scientists were coming to the stage, it sounded like exactly what he’d been up to.
“I think getting them to see how the arts are connected to the community is really important,” said Wintergreen teacher Lauren Barry, who added that teachers planned to discuss the differences between the book and the musical when they returned to school. “This is beyond our school. This is part of the real world.”
Across the theater, Lilly took in the scene and settled into the back rows of the orchestra seats, chatting with her dad on one side, and a classmate on the other. In her science classes at Tuttle, she’s spent the past weeks learning about different states of matter, studying how a solid becomes a liquid, and a liquid becomes a gas. She’s also seen it play out in Ada Twist And The Perilous Pants, in which a character gets carried away because his pants have helium in them.
“I like science because there’s a lot of things that you can do,” she said, bathed in the low, dramatic purple light of the house. “In science, you can explore things. You can learn things. You can do experiments and you can try and figure things out.”
She likes it when the arts intersect with that approach, she added. So when an adult-sized Ada Twist (Gaby Moseley) and her friends Rosie Revere (Katie Kallay) and Iggy Peck (Jackson Wells) exploded onto the stage, science projects crandled in their hands, she snapped to attention, and took in every detail.
Beneath the bright lights of the Shubert’s Broadway house, they were about to give their second-grade teacher, Ms. Lila Greer (Karis Knierim), a run for her money. And in the audience, Lilly didn’t want to miss a moment.
Elliott Williams and teacher Lauren Barry.
On stage, the three intrepid young inventors (Ada is a scientist; Rosie is an engineer; Iggy is an architect) piloted their experiments, testing the teacher’s patience with each curious discovery. As Ada stumbled toward the front of the classroom, her volcano belched dust onto the teacher’s skirt. Seconds later, Rosie’s flying hat ejected a bright, unnatural colored stream of cheese whiz.
Lila, singing through all of it, discouraged this foray into science, overwhelmed by the energy of her students. “Put it back in the trash where you found it!” she exclaimed at one point, and even rows away, Lilly seemed to sit up just a little straighter. Around her, students let out a collective gasp, watching Rosie’s face fall. It was surprisingly close to a very real-world phenomenon, in which girls lose interest in STEM during adolescence, because they don’t have consistent mentors to cheer them on.
Little did Lila know, Lilly soon learned, science was about to save all of them. Overwhelmed by her bold and brilliant students, Lila cooked up a field trip, packing a picnic lunch and sensible shoes for a romp around Blue River Creek (the real star of the show may have been a comically large donut-sized bun bobbing atop her head, which is a nod to Beaty’s original character).
As students headed toward a rickety bridge, Lilly provided running commentary, asking questions about what might happen next. On stage, Lila blanched at the prospect, urging students off the contraption as they raised their voices toward the sky. But the bridge, of course, was Chekhov’s gun: when it fell, dumping students on an island, cries of Oooh! and No! bubbled up from the audience.
Back on stage, the trio got to work, parking an apoplectic Lila Greer beneath a tree. Working with tall trees, student shoelaces and discarded planks of wood, they got to work, rebuilding a bridge that would get them back across. It was science, applied note by note, and it was working. Or in the words of Ada Twist: “There are so many questions to ask,” and all of them are worth asking.
Back in row T, Lilly said she was excited by the show’s message—and its delivery in song. It had jibed with her own love for herpetology, the study of reptiles and amphibians. It’s what she plans to do when she grows up.
“I like that they try to convince their teacher that science is good,” Lilly said after the show. “It reminded me of me being, like, informative and trying to figure things out.”
On Thursdays We Wear Pink
Contributed Photo.
Two days later, Arianna Ellison stepped into the Shubert’s new cabaret theater, finding a seat near one side of the room as attendee nibbled on fruit and bagels. Already, she had been up for hours, thinking about the questions she wanted to ask at her third tech breakfast of the year. Her outfit, a beaded white miniskirt with black Madden pumps, wooly ankle warmers, a long necklace and low ponytail, was complete thanks to a stretchy pink shirt from the Co-Op costume department.
Since starting at Co-Op as a freshman—the same year she moved to New Haven from Los Angeles—Ellison has known she wanted to do tech theater. When she started attending tech breakfasts, she piped up, always ready with a question (or many) for the stage managers and crew members who made time to talk to students. By last fall, she had started shadowing backstage, first on Tina: The Tina Turner Musical and then on Clue, which came to the theater in March.
“I feel like for me, helping others onstage is more fulfilling” than being in the spotlight herself, she said. But even within that world, her love for Mean Girls stands out: the movie got her interested in theater and film when she was just a kid, navigating the cliques and girl groups of middle school. Since first seeing it at 10, she’s returned to it as a sort of foundational text, able to quote several memorable lines, with a particular affinity for the character Gretchen Weiner.
“It was the way they were portraying their emotions” that hooked her, Ellison remembered. Despite its 2004 timestamp, she thinks it’s aged well.
For those that may have somehow missed the film on which the musical is based, it tells the story of Cady Heron, who is thrown into public school for the first time when her family moves from Africa to Illinois. As she navigates this world, she befriends weird-but-endearing art kids Janis and Damian, intrigued by the pink-sporting Plastics and dorky-but-cute Aaron Samuels. The Plastics are perhaps the most interesting: there is queen bee Regina George, surrounded by her minions Gretchen and Karen.
But when Cady makes a plan to infiltrate the Plastics, things go awry. What she learns, of course, is that being mean is more contagious than one might think—and that redemption comes in many forms, including a Mathletes championship and some Barbie-level commentary about how women eat their own. Or as Co-Op student Dejanay Cammock said later that night, during intermission at the show, “all the characters are mean,” each in their own way.
After its release in 2004, Mean Girls became iconic, with lines that are still instantly recognizable two decades later. Ellison thinks of the movie often; she planned her outfit for the musical well in advance, down to the shiny skirt. So when she heard that she would have the chance to meet Kathleen Carragee, the production stage manager on the touring show, she sat bolt upright in her chair, outfit neat as a pin, and beamed.
She was still smiling minutes later, as she settled in with her classmates and teacher, tech theater whiz Janie Alexander, in the theater’s mezzanine seats. On the stage below, load-in was well underway; the crew hung an orange-and-yellow drop curtain, meant to stand in for the African landscape where the play begins. Kelly Wuzzardo, the Shubert’s director of education and engagement, talked students through the crew’s process, from unloading speakers to adjusting lights.
Last year, the Shubert upgraded its system to LED lighting, the first major change to its lighting system since 1983. As if on cue, a crew member leaned forward from the mezzanine, working on a light that was fixed to the railing below. Wuzzardo, moving through the different parts of load-in, seemed to take note. “It’s not for the faint of heart, touring,” she said, recounting how little sleep crew members had likely gotten on their bus.
On Wednesday night, the crew had packed up the show in Williamsport, Penn., getting to sleep around 3:30 a.m. By 7:30, they were pulling into New Haven, where the show would be opening that night.
“Isn’t this fun, seeing how the show unfolds?” Wuzzardo added moments later, greeting Carragee as she made her way down the theater’s steps to students. A few Mmms of agreement escaped from the rows, where most students seemed to still be waking up.
Kathleen Carragee.
Not Ellison, though. As Carragee told students about her nightly work backstage—calling cues, coordinating schedules, being ready to get the “swings” onstage if an actor can’t go on mid-show—Ellison listened intently, taking in every detail. She nodded along as classmate Maya Martinez asked about set pieces and scenery, to which Carragee emphasized the need to be creative.
“How did you come into stage management?” Ellison asked. Carragee smiled, a walkie-talkie adorned with a single, glittering pink rubber duckie wrapped around her back. Maybe she didn’t know—or maybe she did—but the answer would help Ellison chart her own path forward.
Carragee, who has now worked on multiple touring productions, never imagined that she’d be in her position, she said. In high school, she was a props person, in love with theater enough to go on to the University of North Carolina School of the Arts for a degree in stage management. Her junior year of college, the Covid-19 pandemic hit the U.S., bringing the performing arts to a temporary standstill. By her senior year, she was learning to adapt, filming productions with her classmates.
But “we love to sit with audiences, and we love to react with people,” she said. It was part of the thing that made theater so magical. So when she graduated in 2021, she moved to New York, as a production management intern with the Manhattan Theatre Club. The timing was fortuitous: theater was coming back to a new normal, and she was at the epicenter of it in New York City.
It gave her a space to work on contemporary shows, like Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s Lackawanna Blues, Simon Stephens’ Morning Sun and Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew, the New Haven production of which became an early casualty of Covid-19. When her internship ended in 2022, she stayed on as a space’s Covid Safety Manager, a position, she joked, that made her colleagues afraid of her.
By that August, she was doing the theater-hopping, shape-shifting sort of work that artists are often familiar with. She worked on a musical adaptation of Winnie The Pooh that was relatively short lived (“It was cute,” she said, as Ellison hung on to every word). Through a friend, she started touring with a production of Hairspray. Hairspray led to a tour of Fiddler on the Roof. Fiddler led to Elf. And Elf, which ended after the holiday season, led to Mean Girls last year.
“I was like, ‘I never want to tour,’” Carragee remembered with a mischievous grin. Now, it’s her way of life, down to the sleeper bus that the crew takes from one city to the next. Between the time Elf ended and Mean Girls began, she picked up work as a light walker, a person who stands on stage so designers can test lighting cues. Since last August, she’s been calling the cues (literally) for Mean Girls, of which there was a popular 20th anniversary remake last year.
When she had finished, Ellison’s hand shot up, its owner hardly able to contain a question. She took a beat, then spoke. “Do you guys allow shadowing?” she asked.
“I do!” Carragee answered, and Ellison seemed to glow. In Alexander’s class just hours later, she explained that she likes the shadowing process because it gives her a sense of what her work will look like in the professional theater world. At Co-Op, she’s able to soak up some of that from people like Alexander, who mentored her through productions like Into The Woods.
“I’m just grateful to have the opportunity to go to Co-Op,” chimed in Marangelie Colón, a senior who plans to attend Southern Connecticut State University in the fall.
Back at the theater, Executive Director Anthony McDonald said that those sorts of interactions are exactly what he hopes to foster at the Shubert. When he was a kid, seeing Phantom Of The Opera on Broadway turned him on to theater, a love he later channeled into a career. As a dad, he practices what he preaches: he’s brought his young daughter to performances like Sesame Street Live and Fraggle Rock, and thinks about tiny patrons when he’s booking shows.
“You know, I’ve always wanted to make sure that we’re able to provide opportunities like this” for as many students as possible, said McDonald, who credits his parents with seeing and feeding his interest in the arts from an early age. “You never know how the theater will impact a child … Even to this day, I’ve learned more about American history from Hamilton than I did in the classroom.”