The American High School Theatre Festival brings coachloads of US youngsters on to the stage at the Edinburgh festival fringe. Laura Barnett meets some of its organisers and star performers
Each summer, Edinburgh is awash with performers pursuing their dreams of stardom: mime artists and ukulele players, Russian contemporary dancers and comedians – and, perhaps most incongruously of all, hundreds of American high school students.
In the four years that I've been covering the festival, one fringe theatre company has always been particularly intriguing: the American High School Theatre Festival. Leaf through the densely-printed pages of this year's fringe brochure, and this name appears in confident, bold type next to a veritable smorgasbord of shows – among them, variously, Medea, The Mikado, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Bambi: A Life in the Woods and the tantalisingly-titled The Little Bab Snoogle-Fleejer.
So what is this all-American festival-within-a-festival all about? Why have hundreds of American schoolkids hauled themselves across the Atlantic to join the chaos that is the Edinburgh fringe? Are they having a good time? And does anyone in Edinburgh, apart from the odd proud, locally-based family member, pay £5 a show to see what, however ambitious and intriguingly presented, is essentially a series of school productions?
My first port of call is Sarah Cook, the American High School Theatre Festival's programme director. We arrange to meet at the Church Hill theatre; this large, porticoed theatre on Edinburgh's genteel Morningside Road is the AHSTF's main performance space. It's a Tuesday morning, and a coachload of students from the Detroit country day school have just arrived for their 10.20am performance of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street – a new version, the fringe programme claims, set in an asylum. Round the side of the theatre, the performers – costumed in sackcloth, their faces smeared with dirt and white stage-paint – form a circle and hold hands, in a surprisingly professional bonding moment before curtain-up.
Inside the theatre, Cook tells me that AHSTF has been bringing shows to Edinburgh since 1994. Each year, thousands of US high school drama departments compete for a place, nominated by professional theatre directors and college professors both for the students' talent and the school's ethos. Only a very small number of schools are successful: this year, out of 2,200 nominated schools, just 48 have brought shows to the fringe. Each school mounts just four performances of their show, either at Church Hill or one of the two other, smaller venues AHSTF has booked.
So why are the schools so desperate to come to Edinburgh? "It's just such an amazing experience for the kids," Cook says. "The freedom of being here, and seeing the other shows at the Edinburgh fringe, is like nothing they've ever experienced before. There's still such a small proportion of US citizens that actually has a passport; for these kids, to come over here and perform is to step completely outside their comfort zone. They're like the best kind of US ambassadors."
Being an ambassador at the fringe is an expensive business, however. Cook doesn't want to give me even a ballpark figure for how much it costs each child to participate in the festival – the figure changes each year, she says, and she doesn't want prospective future participants to read this article and be put off. But Cook does say that schools and students spend up to two years raising funds, something that Jeff Nahan, a professional theatre director and head of the Conservatory of Performing Arts at the Detroit country day school, confirms when I meet him inside the auditorium, as the five-piece school band tunes up in the pit for Sweeney Todd.
"Coming here has cost each student $5,784 (£3,621)," he says. "That's a lot of money, of course – but our headmaster has been very supportive with fundraising, and the kids have worked hard to raise the money." For that money, the students get their flights, two days in London, their travel up to Edinburgh (on a specially-chartered AHSTF train), and then at least 10 days in Edinburgh, with tickets to the Military Tattoo thrown in. So is it worth it? Nahan's face lights up. "Oh yes. This is about pushing kids beyond the limits of their education – about showing them not to be afraid of pursuing a career in the arts. Here in Edinburgh, they see people who really are making it happen."
Watching Sweeney Todd, it's clear that several of the students in Nahan's cast – who are all aged between 15 and 19 – really could stand a chance of pursuing a career as actors and singers. The young cast handle the tricksy Sondheim vocal lines with aplomb, and 19-year-old Nathan Mondry, as Sweeney, seems as confident as a Broadway old-timer.
Outside the theatre, I ask him what he's getting out of being in Edinburgh. "It's lovely to see the city's history – the mix of old and new," he says. "And it's a challenge to perform in front of an audience of people who don't know us." Tim Markham, 18, who alternates with Mondry in the role of Sweeney and is going to the University of Michigan this September to study acting, agrees. "It's so exciting to see what other professional actors bring to the table," he says. "And we have a lot of fun. Yesterday, after the show, we had a massive pizza party."
As the Sweeney cast are stowed into their waiting coach, the next group arrives: the York County school of the arts from Bruton high school, Virginia, who are about to perform another musical (I'm sensing a theme): Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella. While the audience – mainly teachers and kids from the other American high school groups, with a few local senior citizens thrown in – take their seats, I grab a moment with Shelly Cihak, the show's director.
Coming to Edinburgh, she says, gives the students a chance to see what it's like to put a production together on a professional scale: "We're working with an all-female technical crew, and I think it's really inspiring for them to see that women can make this their profession, too. They're getting so much out of this experience: all of them have risen above anything I could have asked of them."
York County's Cinderella – complete with elaborate costumes, the requisite pumpkin that turns into a carriage, and two hilariously odious Ugly Sisters – is impressive: I don't remember seeing anything as professional as this at my old school. As Cinderella, 18-year-old Alexa Allman is as composed and full-voiced as any of the cast of that US teen phenomenon, High School Musical – which, she tells me after the show, her school actually brought to Edinburgh in 2007. "It's so great performing here," she says. "The audiences are so enthusiastic. And we've been to see Hamlet The Musical, which was brilliant. I love musicals, and this is totally the best place to see them."
For Cihak, it's the opportunity to see shows like these – and just to soak up the fringe atmosphere – that makes the distance and the hard work worthwhile. "The students can learn more about the arts just walking down the Royal Mile," she says, "than they do back home in a whole year."