Post by casey on Oct 3, 2010 16:24:09 GMT -6
www.parade.com/celebrity/2010/10/gotta-be-glee.html
Gotta Be GLEE!
On a Saturday morning toward the end of August, Andres Rivera hurries down the halls of Waubonsie Valley High School in Aurora, Ill. “I’m late,” the 14-year-old football player says, dropping a bag of dirty gym clothes at his feet. But he’s rushing from the field, not to it.
“I’m late for show-choir rehearsal,” he says.
Rivera is one of just six freshmen selected this year for Sound Check, Waubonsie Valley’s audition-only show choir and one of the top-rated groups in the country. Of his unlikely extracurricular double life, he says, “It’s hard for the football team to believe I’d sing and dance. They don’t see me being that guy.” Neither, for that matter, did his parents. When he told them he was trying out, they said, “You want to dance?”
Call it the Glee effect. Since the Fox series about singing teenage misfits premiered in 2009—winning a Golden Globe for best comedy halfway through its first season and clogging up the Billboard charts with a streak of hit singles not seen since the Beatles’ 31-song run in 1964—the idea of show choirs has seeped into the public consciousness in ways that once would have been laughable, if not downright impossible.
Are you a Gleek? Take the quiz!
Show choirs, which combine choral singing and synchronized dance routines, started in the mid-1960s as something of a Midwestern phenomenon. The first competition, held in 1974 in Fort Wayne, Ind., featured only seven groups. Fast-forward to today: ShowChoir.com now lists more than 800 U.S. high schools with glee programs. In January, MTV aired an episode of MADE that focused on helping one school raise $10,000 to compete at a contest in Chicago. And next year, an Arizona-based company, FAME Events, will launch what it’s billing as the first true national show-choir competition—the closest thing yet to Glee’s mythical Nationals.
Glee returned for its second season on Sept. 21, and show choir is more appealing than ever at Waubonsie Valley High. When 10 boys graduated from Sound Check in May, their director, Mark Myers, worried he wouldn’t be able to fill the spots. But a record 36 boys tried out for the 54-student-strong group. Myers took 27. “Many of these kids wouldn’t have known anything about show choir before Glee,” he says.
Watch these show-stopping YouTube clips of real high school glee clubs
Spend a day with Sound Check, and it might seem difficult to separate its members from their TV avatars, New Directions. After all, both groups found success with a cover of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Both are new to the competitive scene yet are already flexing their vocal muscles. (According to the website Show Choir Ratings System, Sound Check, despite having formed only five years ago, is currently ranked No. 2 in the country, down from the top spot a year ago.) And in perhaps the juiciest comparison, both have had in-school conflicts of interest. Like Glee’s choir director, Mr. Schuester, who has an ongoing feud with cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester, Myers admits to disagreements with a fellow teacher over a student’s time commitment to the club. But he insists that’s where the similarities end.
For one thing, Myers says, “Our music isn’t soloist-driven. We don’t have divas.” Glee, on the other hand, has been known to stage competitive “sing-offs” between vying vocalists. And, he adds, no one in Sound Check is pregnant. (Quinn, a member of New Directions, had a baby at the end of last season, immediately after performing at Regionals with the group.)
Myers, 31—who grew up amid the cornfields of Indiana and was himself a show-choir member—also shrugs off talk of intense interschool rivalries like the one Glee’s New Directions has with Vocal Adrenaline. He recalls a 2008 Sound Check run-in with Attaché, a competing choir from Clinton, Miss. Sound Check sang “Listen” from Dreamgirls; Attaché performed a Prince medley. Both lost to Powerhouse, a group from John Burroughs High in Burbank, Calif., recently featured on Oprah singing Madonna’s “Vogue”/“4 Minutes” in powdered wigs. “It was a tight contest,” Myers says. “But everyone was really supportive.”
Though Sound Check won’t be back on the competition circuit for several months, Myers patrols this first rehearsal, laser-focused on correcting sloppy arm movements and flat pitches. More than half the group is new this year, and he’s eager to get them performance-ready. He’s irresistibly dynamic—and eminently quotable. On posture: “You should be crispy toast, not soggy bread.” On volume: “A 31-year-old man should not be louder than eight sopranos!” On lagging energy: “I’m sweating, and I’m just teaching vocals.”
It turns out that dancing while singing is harder than it looks on TV—something freshman Demi Olantunbosun, 14, is finding out as she learns the choreography to “We Dance,” a song from the Broadway musical Once on This Island. The group will run these complicated steps on repeat in the steamy school atrium for the next eight hours.
Olantunbosun, who grew up singing gospel music in a downtown Chicago church, is sweating through her red Sound Check rehearsal T-shirt. “I saw Glee,” she says, “and I was like, ‘Wow, they’re stars! And they have cute outfits!’” Mopping her brow, she half-jokes, “Where’s the water? Where are the cute outfits?” New Directions’ girls may rock Lady Gaga’s armadillo shoes, but the women of Sound Check have more practical costuming concerns. In an effort to keep their bras in place during competitions, the girls often duct tape the straps directly to their skin, says 17-year-old senior Jordan Henderson. “It doesn’t hurt!” she insists. “You sweat so much, the tape comes right off afterward.”
As the group’s first rehearsal winds down, one has to wonder: It can’t all be hard work, can it? Where are the music videos? The impromptu jam sessions? The endless covers of catchy pop anthems? “We have a 15-minute set that we spend months on,” Henderson says. “On Glee, they have new songs every week, and they’re perfect right away.”
The Top 10 Things You Didn’t Know About the Cast of 'Glee'
Sound Check’s first audience today isn’t looking for perfection. At 4 p.m., the kids’ parents arrive to see what the morning has wrought. Under the cafeteria’s unforgiving fluorescent lights, the group takes to the stage, nervous if excited to perform the Caribbean-flavored “We Dance” and another number they’ve been practicing, Michael Jackson’s “Earth Song.” It’s a credit to Myers’ dedication to minutiae, not to mention vowel sounds and enunciation, that a high school choir can sound this good. “Earth Song” could be tricky for singers unaccustomed to gospel rhythms and inflections, yet today, when these 54 voices plead, “What about us?” it sounds honest, authentic even—the words pushing through the last row of the cafeteria and out the back wall. It’s an emotional intensity that doesn’t translate in the group’s YouTube clips.
“I’m teary-eyed already!” one mother says.
It’s clear from the atmosphere in the room that there’s another very important similarity between Sound Check and Glee’s perpetual underdogs: the sense of belonging that students in such a group feel. Glee won a Peabody Award not for perfectly interpreting Madonna’s music but for perfectly depicting the awkward coming-of-age experience of high school with sensitivity and humor. At Waubonsie Valley, as on Glee, show choir is both a safe haven and a creative outlet. “I still have my shell that I like to hide behind,” says senior Nicole Lee, 17, reflecting on her first weekend in the group. “But everyone here is so open. You can do whatever you want, and no one will judge you.”
Has any of Glee’s hip cultural cachet actually rubbed off on the Sound Check members—or just made people more aware of their existence? After all, Glee’s New Directions returned victorious from one competition only to have the so-called cool kids throw slushies at them. Seventeen-year-old Sound Check baritone Lukas Hall is self--assured enough not to care. What’s important to him is the music, the camaraderie. “Everyone cheers each other on,” he says. “We pass the other choirs in the hallway [at competitions] and clap for them. Of course, we also think, Can we beat them?”
That sounds like something the ultra--competitive Rachel Berry would say on Glee, no?
“We all have a little bit of Rachel in us,” Hall admits, smiling. “But it’s not about winning.”
Their director agrees, noting that his emphasis isn’t on score sheets but on education. “That experience of singing and performing and being on stage makes kids more open,” Myers remarks. “Kids who are shy or tend to be withdrawn—I’ve seen them change.” As for the attention show choirs are now getting because of Glee, he says, “It’s nice that people across the country can recognize what we do. But I already thought show choir was cool.”
Gotta Be GLEE!
On a Saturday morning toward the end of August, Andres Rivera hurries down the halls of Waubonsie Valley High School in Aurora, Ill. “I’m late,” the 14-year-old football player says, dropping a bag of dirty gym clothes at his feet. But he’s rushing from the field, not to it.
“I’m late for show-choir rehearsal,” he says.
Rivera is one of just six freshmen selected this year for Sound Check, Waubonsie Valley’s audition-only show choir and one of the top-rated groups in the country. Of his unlikely extracurricular double life, he says, “It’s hard for the football team to believe I’d sing and dance. They don’t see me being that guy.” Neither, for that matter, did his parents. When he told them he was trying out, they said, “You want to dance?”
Call it the Glee effect. Since the Fox series about singing teenage misfits premiered in 2009—winning a Golden Globe for best comedy halfway through its first season and clogging up the Billboard charts with a streak of hit singles not seen since the Beatles’ 31-song run in 1964—the idea of show choirs has seeped into the public consciousness in ways that once would have been laughable, if not downright impossible.
Are you a Gleek? Take the quiz!
Show choirs, which combine choral singing and synchronized dance routines, started in the mid-1960s as something of a Midwestern phenomenon. The first competition, held in 1974 in Fort Wayne, Ind., featured only seven groups. Fast-forward to today: ShowChoir.com now lists more than 800 U.S. high schools with glee programs. In January, MTV aired an episode of MADE that focused on helping one school raise $10,000 to compete at a contest in Chicago. And next year, an Arizona-based company, FAME Events, will launch what it’s billing as the first true national show-choir competition—the closest thing yet to Glee’s mythical Nationals.
Glee returned for its second season on Sept. 21, and show choir is more appealing than ever at Waubonsie Valley High. When 10 boys graduated from Sound Check in May, their director, Mark Myers, worried he wouldn’t be able to fill the spots. But a record 36 boys tried out for the 54-student-strong group. Myers took 27. “Many of these kids wouldn’t have known anything about show choir before Glee,” he says.
Watch these show-stopping YouTube clips of real high school glee clubs
Spend a day with Sound Check, and it might seem difficult to separate its members from their TV avatars, New Directions. After all, both groups found success with a cover of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Both are new to the competitive scene yet are already flexing their vocal muscles. (According to the website Show Choir Ratings System, Sound Check, despite having formed only five years ago, is currently ranked No. 2 in the country, down from the top spot a year ago.) And in perhaps the juiciest comparison, both have had in-school conflicts of interest. Like Glee’s choir director, Mr. Schuester, who has an ongoing feud with cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester, Myers admits to disagreements with a fellow teacher over a student’s time commitment to the club. But he insists that’s where the similarities end.
For one thing, Myers says, “Our music isn’t soloist-driven. We don’t have divas.” Glee, on the other hand, has been known to stage competitive “sing-offs” between vying vocalists. And, he adds, no one in Sound Check is pregnant. (Quinn, a member of New Directions, had a baby at the end of last season, immediately after performing at Regionals with the group.)
Myers, 31—who grew up amid the cornfields of Indiana and was himself a show-choir member—also shrugs off talk of intense interschool rivalries like the one Glee’s New Directions has with Vocal Adrenaline. He recalls a 2008 Sound Check run-in with Attaché, a competing choir from Clinton, Miss. Sound Check sang “Listen” from Dreamgirls; Attaché performed a Prince medley. Both lost to Powerhouse, a group from John Burroughs High in Burbank, Calif., recently featured on Oprah singing Madonna’s “Vogue”/“4 Minutes” in powdered wigs. “It was a tight contest,” Myers says. “But everyone was really supportive.”
Though Sound Check won’t be back on the competition circuit for several months, Myers patrols this first rehearsal, laser-focused on correcting sloppy arm movements and flat pitches. More than half the group is new this year, and he’s eager to get them performance-ready. He’s irresistibly dynamic—and eminently quotable. On posture: “You should be crispy toast, not soggy bread.” On volume: “A 31-year-old man should not be louder than eight sopranos!” On lagging energy: “I’m sweating, and I’m just teaching vocals.”
It turns out that dancing while singing is harder than it looks on TV—something freshman Demi Olantunbosun, 14, is finding out as she learns the choreography to “We Dance,” a song from the Broadway musical Once on This Island. The group will run these complicated steps on repeat in the steamy school atrium for the next eight hours.
Olantunbosun, who grew up singing gospel music in a downtown Chicago church, is sweating through her red Sound Check rehearsal T-shirt. “I saw Glee,” she says, “and I was like, ‘Wow, they’re stars! And they have cute outfits!’” Mopping her brow, she half-jokes, “Where’s the water? Where are the cute outfits?” New Directions’ girls may rock Lady Gaga’s armadillo shoes, but the women of Sound Check have more practical costuming concerns. In an effort to keep their bras in place during competitions, the girls often duct tape the straps directly to their skin, says 17-year-old senior Jordan Henderson. “It doesn’t hurt!” she insists. “You sweat so much, the tape comes right off afterward.”
As the group’s first rehearsal winds down, one has to wonder: It can’t all be hard work, can it? Where are the music videos? The impromptu jam sessions? The endless covers of catchy pop anthems? “We have a 15-minute set that we spend months on,” Henderson says. “On Glee, they have new songs every week, and they’re perfect right away.”
The Top 10 Things You Didn’t Know About the Cast of 'Glee'
Sound Check’s first audience today isn’t looking for perfection. At 4 p.m., the kids’ parents arrive to see what the morning has wrought. Under the cafeteria’s unforgiving fluorescent lights, the group takes to the stage, nervous if excited to perform the Caribbean-flavored “We Dance” and another number they’ve been practicing, Michael Jackson’s “Earth Song.” It’s a credit to Myers’ dedication to minutiae, not to mention vowel sounds and enunciation, that a high school choir can sound this good. “Earth Song” could be tricky for singers unaccustomed to gospel rhythms and inflections, yet today, when these 54 voices plead, “What about us?” it sounds honest, authentic even—the words pushing through the last row of the cafeteria and out the back wall. It’s an emotional intensity that doesn’t translate in the group’s YouTube clips.
“I’m teary-eyed already!” one mother says.
It’s clear from the atmosphere in the room that there’s another very important similarity between Sound Check and Glee’s perpetual underdogs: the sense of belonging that students in such a group feel. Glee won a Peabody Award not for perfectly interpreting Madonna’s music but for perfectly depicting the awkward coming-of-age experience of high school with sensitivity and humor. At Waubonsie Valley, as on Glee, show choir is both a safe haven and a creative outlet. “I still have my shell that I like to hide behind,” says senior Nicole Lee, 17, reflecting on her first weekend in the group. “But everyone here is so open. You can do whatever you want, and no one will judge you.”
Has any of Glee’s hip cultural cachet actually rubbed off on the Sound Check members—or just made people more aware of their existence? After all, Glee’s New Directions returned victorious from one competition only to have the so-called cool kids throw slushies at them. Seventeen-year-old Sound Check baritone Lukas Hall is self--assured enough not to care. What’s important to him is the music, the camaraderie. “Everyone cheers each other on,” he says. “We pass the other choirs in the hallway [at competitions] and clap for them. Of course, we also think, Can we beat them?”
That sounds like something the ultra--competitive Rachel Berry would say on Glee, no?
“We all have a little bit of Rachel in us,” Hall admits, smiling. “But it’s not about winning.”
Their director agrees, noting that his emphasis isn’t on score sheets but on education. “That experience of singing and performing and being on stage makes kids more open,” Myers remarks. “Kids who are shy or tend to be withdrawn—I’ve seen them change.” As for the attention show choirs are now getting because of Glee, he says, “It’s nice that people across the country can recognize what we do. But I already thought show choir was cool.”