The young stars of Rise include Auli’i Cravalho and Damon J. Gillespie, who also star in Spring Awakening, the musical that unfolds within the series.

Peter Kramer /NBC

Jason Katims, creator–executive producer, and exec producer Jeffrey Seller confer on location at St. John’s Prep in Queens, New York.

Peter Kramer /NBC

Exec producer Flody Suarez watches rehearsal with star Josh Radnor. The actor best known for How I Met Your Mother plays Lou Mazzuchelli, the dedicated English teacher who takes over the high school’s flagging theater department.

Peter Kramer /NBC

Josh Radnor, as drama coach Lou Mazzuchelli, rehearses his high schoolers, played by (from left) Ellie Desautels, Joshua Grosso, Auli’i Cravalho, Shannon Purser, Sean Grandillo, Ted Sutherland and Amy Forsyth.

Peter Kramer /NBC

Sean Grandillo and Ted Sutherland, as drama students, join Tom Riis Farrell, as Mr. Baer, at the piano.

Peter Kramer /NBC
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March 22, 2018
Features

Ticket To Rise

Jason Katims sets his newest NBC drama in high school musical theater, where the footlights find some big hearts — and big hopes — in small-town America.

Bob Makela

On a frigid winter afternoon in New York City, nearly a dozen young people are living out their dreams in a rehearsal space at St. John's Prep in Queens. But they're not students — not at this school, anyway. They're here as young actors, rehearsing the play that's at the heart of a new TV show.

The play is the Tony-winning musical Spring Awakening. And the show is NBC's new musical drama, Rise, from creator–executive producer Jason Katims (Friday Night Lights) and fellow exec producer Jeffrey Seller (Broadway's Hamilton).

The project, which premiered March 13, was inspired by New York Times reporter Michael Sokolove's 2013 book — Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater — about Lou Volpe and his theater department at Levittown, Pennsylvania's Truman High School.

That blue-chip pedigree is one reason this is a dream gig for the performers flitting about the rehearsal room. And it's the first TV job for most of them. Auli'i Cravalho, a high school senior from Hawaii, had never acted on camera before, though she voiced the titular role in Disney's animated feature Moana.

In Rise, she plays Lilette Suarez, who stars as the female lead Wendla in Spring Awakening, opposite Damon J. Gillespie, a Chattanooga, Tennessee, native whose only previous TV work was an appearance in an Amy Schumer skit. He was working at the Dunkin' Donuts in New York's Union Square when he landed the role of Robbie Thorne, the star quarterback who defies his coach by playing male lead Melchior in the controversial musical.

Around the corner from the rehearsal space's youthful buzz, a small cadre of adults gathers in a glorified storage room the size of a Manhattan studio apartment. Large boxes of props and costumes flank a haphazard row of six director's chairs in this makeshift command center.

Katims, who wrote the episode they're shooting today, stares at a pair of monitors, watching the takes of a pivotal scene. A few feet away stands Josh Radnor, who plays Lou Mazzuchelli, the embattled English teacher-turned-theater director. Minutes earlier, he'd been in this room running lines with a script supervisor. Now he's being asked for input on multiple takes of his big speech.

"What do you think?" Katims asks.

"I think it's in there somewhere — just paste it together," Radnor says and exits to a chorus of laughs.

If anyone in television can paste together perfection from multiple takes, characters and storylines, it's Katims. He's proved as much on shows like Friday Night Lights and Parenthood, another critically acclaimed, large ensemble project he created.

"We have more characters than most shows," says executive producer Flody Suarez (8 Simple Rules). "They're all specific, and Jason services every storyline, every week. It's really a master class in writing."

The series is ostensibly about Radnor's burned-out educator who, after 17 years of teaching English, lights a fire in his soul by taking over the theater department from its longtime director Tracey Wolfe — played with edgy vulnerability by Rosie Perez — and putting on a production of the polarizing Spring Awakening.

But Rise is about more than a high school musical and a teacher's redemption story. It deftly touches on topics like class, arts funding, teen pregnancy, family dynamics and LGBTQ issues, to name but a few.

"I love doing stories that are very character-driven — small, simple stories that touch me," Katims whispers in the darkened storage room as the actors shoot a scene in the next room. "Having done Friday Night Lights, I felt there was something about observing life in a small town that I really loved, and I wanted to do it again. But in the back of my mind, I was always thinking, 'How can I do this — but have it not be Friday Night Lights?'"

Katims found his entry point through a theater program in a fictional blue-collar town in Pennsylvania. "It felt like it was a cousin to what I did at Friday Night Lights," he says of the beloved show set in a small Texas town."But it was different enough that it would be new material and new things to observe, the different areas of high school — the jocks versus theater kids. I want to make it feel like we're invested in the people, the characters."

Much as he did with Friday Night Lights, Katims has used an acclaimed work of nonfiction as a springboard into fictional realms of personal resonance. "I really try, as a writer, to trust my instincts and lean into things that feel real to me, things I can connect to, things I've either experienced myself or have been through with my friends and family," Katims says during a break, sitting in St. John's Broadway-sized theater.

He says he feels "very much connected" to the fictional theater director and his desire "to do more, to be a better version of himself."

Katims has taken some flak for reimagining Lou as a happily married, heterosexual English teacher of 17 years who takes over the theater department in his early 40s. The real Lou Volpe began teaching theater in his early 20s, got married and eventually came out as gay. Some LGBTQ advocates have objected to Lou's heterosexuality on Rise.

Katims addressed the criticism at the Television Critics Association winter press tour. "I needed to make it kind of my own story," he said. "And I definitely didn't want to shy away from issues of sexuality and gender."

In reworking reality, he points out, he added new characters with their own challenges, including Michael, who is transgender, and Simon, "who's dealing with his emerging sexuality and growing up in a very conservative religious family. Those stories felt like they… resonated with me as a storyteller, and I wanted to lean into that.

"And then with Lou's family… there's a lot of reimagination, not only in terms of whether he was gay or straight, but in terms of [Lou's] family structure."

Katims also created Cravalho's Lilette and Gillespie's Robbie; their budding romance lets him revisit the days when he and his wife were high school sweethearts in Brooklyn's Midwood neighborhood.

"I wanted to create this couple that meet and have this very deep connection with each other," he says. "It was more than a 'showmance' to me. It might look like that to the world, but there's really this deep connection. When you're writing, there are all these elements that you just naturally go to — sometimes consciously, sometimes completely unconsciously."

Months before Katims signed on, veteran TV producer Flody Suarez was watching Jeffrey Seller at a theater workshop in New York City. "I was blown away," Suarez recalls. "I thought, 'That's the guy who knows how to do this.'"

Seller, however, had never dipped into television. A former high school theater kid from a Detroit suburb, he'd become a made man on Broadway after producing Rent in 1996. He was still in the development phase with Hamilton when Suarez proposed an enticing idea.

"It was only through serendipity that Flody came into my life and said, 'Hey, let's go make some TV — I have friends at NBC,'" Seller recalls. Once they'd landed a development deal, the first idea Seller brought to Suarez was Drama High. They took it to NBC Entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt, who has a history of producing Broadway musicals (Dear Evan Hansen, A Gentleman's Guide to Love & Murder) and of bringing some to live TV (Hairspray Live!, The Wiz Live! et cetera).

"I said, 'This is what I love, and I think this would be a great TV show,'" Seller recalls. "Drama High, and now by extension Rise, represents everything I care about — family, theater and community."

Seller has been particularly gratified to introduce some of his Broadway friends to Katims, who was a little-known playwright before Ed Zwick hired him to write for My So-Called Life in 1994. Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Tom Kitt (Next to Normal) is the musical director for Rise, and Danny Mefford (Dear Evan Hansen) is the show's choreographer.

Working with music this way has been a revelation for Katims. "This added layer of musical theater, when we know what's going on in [the characters'] lives" — Katims points to the scene in which Lilette's single mom hears her daughter sing and watches her shine for the first time — "makes the alchemy of all this something very, very special."

The ever-youthful Radnor was initially surprised to realize he's the grizzled vet on this show, thanks largely to his 208 episodes of How I Met Your Mother. He and Perez are the show's familiar faces, yet both acknowledge a special connection to the whole Rise experience.

Radnor, who's also written and directed a pair of indie movies (Happythankyoumoreplease), didn't know if he wanted to return to network television after nine years on HIMYM.

But he was a big fan of Katims's work. "Watching [his] shows as an actor, I always had this feeling that I wanted to climb into the TV and be a part of that world," Radnor says during a dinner break. "The characters are so dimensional and complicated and messy and real and honorable."

Plus, the themes Katims and his writing staff tackle in Rise resonate with Radnor, a self-described Midwestern public school theater guy. "It felt like the right time for something like this," he says. "It's a theater department dropped into the heart of this country, with all its roiling controversies and polarities."

Perez wasn't into musical theater while growing up in Queens. She claims she was more of a political science junkie and a math-science nerd. But she's been a fierce advocate for thousands of students through her involvement with Urban Arts Partnership, a charity she co-founded 25 years ago. When offered the role of Tracey, the demoted theater director, Perez thought, "Oh my God, I could do this part in my sleep."

Years of working with young people have given her a unique perspective, which has strengthened her affinity for the show and its purpose. "It's interesting," she says on the phone from L.A., a month after shooting has wrapped. "After 25 years, you see how trends and fads come and go, but the kids remain the same. They all have their issues; they all have their doubts and insecurities and pain and secrets. Rise takes on all of that."

By some standards, Cravalho was not a strong candidate when she auditioned for Rise last year. She was 16, with no on-camera experience. She'd never even landed a decent role in her own high school's musicals. But she was in L.A. preparing to sing "How Far I'll Go" from Moana at the 2017 Oscars, and her agents thought a TV tryout might help take her mind off the big night. It would give her something else to focus on.

The strategy worked. She delivered a poised and perfect performance at the Oscars. But halfway into reading the Rise script, Cravalho was in tears. "It was so beautiful and so real," she recalls. "I loved everything about it." That connection with the material probably calmed her nerves, even though she'd been on very few auditions up to that point; most of her professional experience had been singing and recording dialogue in a sound booth.

"There are some projects that you read a script for and you think, 'Oh, this is my role,'" Cravalho says. "But for Rise, I didn't necessarily feel that. I wanted the best for the project itself. After reading the script, I knew that it was so necessary, so relevant and beautiful in every shape and form. Every character was so important."

Gillespie had a completely different take. "To me, it was just another audition," he recalls, sitting in the cavernous St. John's cafeteria. The crew's dinner chatter echoes throughout the room as he adds, "And now I feel bad, thinking I should've treated it differently. But every time I get excited about an audition, I get really attached to it. And then when I don't get it, I'm broken."

He says he'd been making it to the final callbacks on Hamilton for three-and-a-half years. "So I was like, 'No, it's just another audition.'"

Just another audition that changed his life.

Even beyond the day-to-day work, Katims relishes so much about Rise: the way it's brought him back to the theater, returning to his New York roots after years in L.A., working with new Broadway collaborators and the opportunity to inspire a generation of theater kids. (To support that inspiration, NBC is launching R.I.S.E. America, which will distribute $500,000 in grants to high school theater programs across America.)

"On a personal level, I'm happy every day," Katims says. "To come and work with these great young actors — and to be able to put on a show within a show — it's been a moving and beautiful experience."

He recalls one moment in particular, when he was watching the second episode in the editing room. Second episodes, he says, are usually terrifying. "Because the pilot explains everything. You put all this time into it, then by the time the second episode comes along, you're like, 'Oh God, what are we doing?'"

But he had a different reaction to this second episode. "When it ended," he remembers, "I really got emotional. I said to the editor, 'I'm really happy that this is my show and I'm involved with it. But taking myself aside, I'm just really happy that the show exists.'

"And I really feel that way. It's putting something out there in the world that feels so humane. It's so human — at a time when we really need that. We really need that."


This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 2, 2018


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