Santa Barbara High School Theatre

August 2007--The American High School Theatre Festival, in its twelfth year of presenting the best in American high school theatre programs at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, has chosen Santa Barbara High School as one of its 22 programs from across the country that will perform in Scotland in August of 2008. 

     In 1994. a group of high school and college drama professionals recognized the need for an international forum where America’s top high school drama students could showcase their skills.  The result was creation of the American High School Theatre Festival.

            The annual festival runs in conjunction with the world-renowned Edinburgh Fringe Festival—the world’s largest performing arts festival—held each August in Edinburgh, Scotland.

            The nation’s top high school theatre programs are nominated by state, regional, and national theatre organizations as well as university professors to participate in the Festival.  Each nominated school receives an application, which is then reviewed by the Board of Advisors, a panel of college theatre professionals from across the country.

            The Santa Barbara High School Theatre program is proud to announce that it has been selected to perform in Edinburgh, Scotland at the Theatre Festival in August of 2008.  Each year many schools are nominated to represent the United States at the Fringe Festival, the largest gathering of actors and performances in the world.  Top high school programs are identified based on their most recent bodies of work, honors, and awards, technical ability, community involvement, philosophies and recommendations.  We live in a talented community—Santa Barbara High School, under the direction of Performing Arts Department Chair Otto Layman, now joins David Holmes and his San Marcos High School Theatre in 2002 as participants in one of the greatest theatre adventures a high school student could experience.

     The show will be designed by Mike Madden of the Ensemble Theatre, Musical Direction for thiis production by John Douglas, choreographyby Christina McCarthy, and costumes desgined by Lise Lange.

     Santa Barbara High School has chosen one of the seminal works in American theatre, the first rock opera and THE American Tribal Love-Rock musical, HAIR.  Created in the heat of the Vietnam protest and the flourishing of the Flower Power, HAIR was a generation’s response to the tumult of a nation in change. HAIR is as relevant and powerful today as it was forty years ago.