The Senior School musical has been chosen. The cast has been set. And rehearsals for both cast and orchestra have already begun. Mounting a full-length, Broadway musical is always a huge undertaking, but this year’s musical feels particularly daunting. This year’s production is a massive piece. This is a show that is entirely sung. This is a musical that so many people around the world hold as their favourite musical of all time. This is Les Misérables.
This journey began at the end of the 2024-25 school year…
As a production team, we came together in May not only to debrief last year’s show, The Prom, but also to begin discussing what we would tackle next. It’s never an easy choice. There are so many factors to take into consideration: has SMUS done it in the past 10 years or so? Has it been done at the McPherson Playhouse in the last few years? Does it provide plenty of roles? Does it allow for the ensemble to be fully utilized? Is it high school appropriate? Will cast members want to do it? Will audiences come to see it? And the list goes on.
Having done two musical comedies over the past two years, we felt that we wanted to tackle something more dramatic and, right from the get-go, Les Misérables stormed to the top of the list. By June, the application for performance rights was submitted, and several weeks later—just after classes had ended—the long-awaited approval arrived. Securing the rights to a major Broadway show is never simple, with plenty of rules and restrictions to navigate, but once the green light came through, the excitement really began.
This September, we hit the ground running with auditions in the first full week of classes. Over three days of auditions, each and every student bravely stood up in front of the whole group to sing 30-60 seconds of a song of their choice, to learn and perform a selection of choreography, and then to sing another two-minute section of a song from the show. A daunting task handled incredibly well by over 50 students from Grade 9-12 who auditioned. Then, after one more callback audition, the creative team undertook the grueling task of casting the show.
I often relate the casting process to a game of Jenga. Once you set the preliminary foundation of the cast, if you shift one piece, the whole tower will potentially fall. Indeed, as we sat late into the night in the Drama Room, our tower collapsed a number of times. In the end, we walked away with an amazing cast that will be sure to impress. And, while this casting process was going on, Ms. Guillen was pulling double duty, as she was putting together an incredible group of 28 students for the pit orchestra.
We are able to mount these massive shows with the countless hours of help from a wonderfully varied group of staff members:
- Stel.la Guillen (Music Director)
- Christina Banman (Vocal Director)
- Kelli McLeod (Choreographer)
- Alana Green (Costumes)
- Alli Higinbotham (Props)
- Simone Kuklinski (Production Coordinator)
- Krista Jones (Set Design & Painting)
- and tackling his 20th and final SMUSical production, the incomparable Peter Leggatt (Set Construction).
So mark your calendars, February 26 - March 1, 2026. This will undoubtedly be a show that will be talked about for years to come.
