No sex please, they're students

Princess Amneris is not amused. She's been waiting a long time for her betrothed, Radames, to return from fighting the Nubians and visit her bedchamber, and here he is talking to her slave girl, Aida.

In the Broadway version of Elton John and Tim Rice's ''Aida," Amneris rebukes the Egyptian warrior: ''There's a buck-naked princess lounging in her bed, calling your name."

But when the North Shore Music Theatre's Youth Performance Academy performed the show this summer in South Hamilton's Pingree School theater, that line was cut. Instead, the 16-year-old playing Amneris, Nina Bjornstad, just complained about wanting more attention from Radames.

Changing sultry to sulky is only part of what goes into adapting a Tony Award-winning musical about a love triangle amid ethnic warfare into something appropriate for high schoolers. ''Aida: School Edition" grew out of a burgeoning collaboration between Music Theatre International, a major theatrical licensing agency, and Disney Theatrical Productions, which produced the Broadway version of ''Aida." MTI, in turn, has worked for several years with North Shore's teachers and student performers to test adaptations -- addressing scripts, lyrics, music, choreography, and sets -- in productions that become templates for licensed versions that thousands of schools around the country will stage.

The grand vision is to create scaled-down versions of Broadway plays for schools to perform. But every partner in such a collaboration has its own motive: Authors want their musicals adapted with integrity and style. MTI, Disney, and North Shore all hope that young people smitten with theater will become the audiences of the future. And of course there's money to be made: MTI refused to release financial information, but a conservative rough estimate of gross revenues from licenses is $1.7 million a year -- not including production extras that many schools buy. And if ''Aida: School Edition" is successful, that figure could grow considerably.

With such complex considerations, adaptation requires more than dialing down the sexual thermostat. It takes a small army at both MTI and North Shore. MTI education manager Marty Johnson hires musical adapters such as Derek Bowley, who is also North Shore's music director, to adjust the score for rookie voices: lowering keys, simplifying harmonies, and trimming verses or reprises.

''What people don't understand is that high school voices are not used to singing a huge rock 'n' roll score," Johnson says. ''If they're singing it for 2 1/2 hours, they'll lose their voices."

He also hires writers to edit a musical's ''book," or script, to meet local and state standards for school programs and to eliminate anything potentially offensive.

''We're dealing with a love story, but we want to make it accessible and appropriate," he says. ''We go by what's going to work in Iowa, not just New York City."

Staging ground
Around 1994 or 1995, Freddie Gershon, chairman and principal of MTI, says he was worrying about the future. Not only were schools failing to introduce theater to students, but kids -- lured by Nintendo, rock concerts, and TV -- weren't going to plays. So, he thought, why not bring musicals to the schools?

First, he had to get the musicals' creators to allow alterations. Stephen Sondheim was among the first to come on board, says Gershon. Sondheim proposed adapting ''Sweeney Todd," but Gershon thought school principals might balk at a murdering cannibal barber. Ultimately, the first Broadway Junior production was more kid-friendly: ''Annie Junior," a middle school show, went onstage in 1997 in the tiny town of Gowanda, N.Y.

''The entire town took the day off and saw the matinee," says Gershon.

Since then, MTI's Broadway Junior program has grown to encompass three categories: School Edition for high schools, Broadway Junior for middle schools, and Kids Collection for elementary schools. Besides length and musical complexity, the difference between a half-hour Kids Collection show and a full-length School Edition one, says North Shore artistic director Jon Kimbell, is the level of sophistication. ''You're dealing with 'Cinderella' versus 'Ragtime,' " he says, ''which is a much more dense piece of theater and deals with social issues of ethnicity and prejudice."

North Shore joined the program after it staged the musical ''Honk!" in 2000. MTI officials, who regularly license musicals to the company, suggested that North Shore's education program could help them fine-tune a middle school version of the show. ''Honk! Junior" was such a success in 2001 that the theater kept developing pilots. This summer there were five: ''Aida" and four elementary school shows.

North Shore is one of several US theaters doing such pilots. And Disney became involved in 2003, when Disney Theatrical Productions linked with MTI to adapt stage versions of Disney's kids films. Three Kids Collection shows, all from Disney, were released in January.

''What [MTI] had was Broadway Junior," says John Clark, senior vice president and general manager of Disney Live Family Entertainment. ''Nobody else had that. It was a unique opportunity."

MTI provides a ''Broadway musical in a box" kit with the licenses, so even schools with no drama department can put on a polished production. The Broadway Junior kit, for example, contains scripts, an orchestrated CD to accompany the cast, a choreography DVD, curriculum guides, and a producer/director guide.

And there are extras: For $250, high schools can rent RehearScore, software with a show's piano accompaniment that can be manipulated for rehearsal purposes. Schools can get T-shirts, production slides, and logo packs for making posters and programs. And high schools can rent, for $350-$450, the OrchEXTRA, a computer with a keyboard that can play all the instruments to give a skimpy orchestra a fuller sound. Just like Broadway.

A passionate approach
For the 14- to 18-year-old North Shore ''Aida" performers, the process began with rehearsals in July. One steamy day at the Pingree School, where North Shore often stages its children's shows, actors in shorts and T-shirts lounged on long tables.

Director Mark Steven Robinson gathered the ensemble around Presilah Nunez, who's playing Aida. Accompanied by a keyboard, 28 trained voices slowly built the passionate anthem ''The Gods Love Nubia." At the climax, Nunez raised her hand like a gospel singer. After the last note died away, Robinson, choked up, said, ''It gets me every time."

Taking a breath, he started to give notes. ''Whatever the spirit of Nubia is, give it all away. And use good breath support."

With one of the nation's largest and oldest educational outreach programs, North Shore has the expertise to work out the kinks in fledgling kids' musicals. And it has visibility: Auditions for this ''Aida" drew 300 hopefuls. Two dozen or so made the cut.

Nunez, 15, is gorgeous and belts like a dream; she has performed in five other Youth Performance Academy musicals. Nicholas Christopher, a rangy 14-year-old from Winchester, seems shy offstage but comes alive as Radames. This will be his eighth show at North Shore since 2003's pilot of ''Ragtime: School Edition."

Even 10 years after his initial idea, Gershon still sounds impassioned about how musicals can change students' lives. If you do a musical, he tells schools, here's what you get: ''There's a visual-arts element; they design and build sets. There's the costume element; they work with their parents by going into the attic to find old costumes. There's acting, singing, and learning music."

Being part of a show teaches time management and teamwork, he says. ''If you do 'Annie,' you learn about the New Deal, the stock market crash, Hoover."

Having released 16 school shows, with another eight to 10 coming in the next two years, MTI is extending its reach. Through a deal with textbook publisher Macmillan McGraw-Hill, more than half of the kindergartners through eighth graders in 40,000 US schools will study musical theater as part of their curriculum.

Reaching into the school market has its benefits for Disney and MTI. The one School Edition show available now, ''Les Miserables," pulls in about 400 licenses annually, ranging from $900-$1,500. The 12 Broadway Junior shows (from ''Disney's Aladdin" to ''Into the Woods") bring in a total of 3,000-4,000 licenses a year at $450 to $550 each. Kids Collection licenses run $395. Because those shows were only released in January, Disney and MTI representatives said the number of licenses was not available. And an MTI official said he was not able to determine how much the extra merchandise brings in.

Nor would MTI, a private company, reveal its profits. McDonald says, ''By the time we've adapted the show for the proper age group, created and manufactured the support materials, and developed the market, it doesn't bear large profits." Because MTI is a licensing agent, 80 percent of the net profits go back to the authors or their estates, says Gershon.

MTI representatives say the program is a long-term investment. ''Musicals are waning, says McDonald. ''We want to protect the market by getting kids excited about musicals so they'll grow up and be season subscribers, so that MTI and the authors can enjoy the revenue they've earned."

Gershon says Broadway Junior is turning into a business. ''Maybe a decade from now we'll see results. We're breeding a cultured, savvy generation." Some 1 million students each year participate in these musicals, according to Drew Cohen, MTI's general manager.

As for North Shore, the theater isn't paid for its assistance in staging the pilots, but no one's complaining. The theater gets a free license for the shows it works on. And the relationship with Disney and MTI pays off in other ways.

''We got to do the regional premiere of 'Thoroughly Modern Millie,' " Kimbell points out, ''and were the first to do [the grown-up version] of 'Aida.' "

Lessons learned
After the show at Pingree, when the cheers died down and the actors, some holding bouquets, again filled the stage, Johnson grilled them on what worked, what didn't. This show will have another pilot production in Wisconsin in January, and all the changes will be vetted with authors' representatives and go into the script. Then the show will join MTI's catalog. The first ''Aida: School Edition" is expected in the 2006-07 school year.

Fanning themselves with ''Aida"-logoed paper fans and revved by post-show adrenaline, the actors launched into their feedback.

Some of the key changes weren't necessary, they said. They're now too low.

They hated the cuts in Radames's ''Fortune Favors the Brave."

Johnson nodded.

Then Bjornstad, a little plaintively, said, ''I liked the 'buck-naked' line. It was sad to cut it."