Traverse City West High School Choir Director Erich Wangeman was ready when the smash Broadway hit musical Newsies became available for high schools to perform on March 1; he knew it was one his kids could do well, and a show audiences would be drawn to. What he didn’t know was that across town at TC Central, Choir Director Tami Williams had been eyeballing Newsies for years, and was also ready to pounce.

And so, for the first time, Traverse City’s two high schools will mount identical musical productions during the 2018-’19 school year.

The schools have performed several of the same shows, but always in different school years. Last fall, Central presented a production of Les Misérables, a musical West had performed previously. In the past, though, those overlaps have always been separated by at least a few years.

This year, Central will present the musical during the second and third weekends of November, while West’s production is planned for the first two weekends of March 2019.

Newsies – which originated as a 1992 live-action Disney film starring Christian Bale, Bill Pullman, and Robert Duvall – is beloved for its Alan Menken score and its energetic, dance-heavy staging. The film was a box office bomb but was later adapted into a hit Broadway musical that won a pair of Tony Awards in 2012, for Best Choreography and Best Original Score.

“They didn’t realize they were each looking at the show until they both called the Music Office on the day it was released to secure the rights,” TC West Principal Joe Esper says of the two choir directors.

The double-booking revealed something that music department staff and administrators at both schools had never realized: There was no protocol in place for the schools to communicate with one another about their intended musical choices. At both Central and West, the choral director is ultimately in charge of picking the show – a process that involves consulting with band and orchestra teachers, theatrical directors, choreographers, and district music coordinators. There is a lot of communication and conversation, but none of it spans the cross-town gap.

“The communication is all within the programs at each school,” Esper says. “Talking with band, orchestra, and theatrical directors to know what menu of shows might be in your kids’ capacity, and then narrowing down that list. The piece we haven’t asked our teachers to do in the past is to talk across town to each other."

A new cross-town communication protocol is likely on the docket for future years. In the meantime, though, Central and West had to figure out how to handle a situation in which they’d both ordered the rights to the same show. For Williams, the idea of backing out and picking another musical simply wasn’t an option.

“We had a conversation, and the consensus was, ‘Why should one of the schools miss out on this opportunity?’” she says. “It’s the same school district, but there are a dozen schools all over Michigan that are going to be doing this same show [next year]. So, we were thinking about what would be best for our students, and after announcing Newsies, we thought it would just be a letdown to change the show when students are so excited about it."

Wangeman feels similarly. “Having two schools within the same large district do the same show is not foreign in other cities,” he says. “With the immense talent on both sides of town [in Traverse City], it’s surprising this hasn’t occurred before. The performing arts is not a competitive arena. We celebrate the opportunity for students to build supportive bridges across town. It would do all students a disservice not to have the opportunity to do this show."

If there’s a downside to both schools doing the same musical, it’s the risk of the local community developing 'Newsies fatigue' and losing interest in the production by the time West performs it next spring. However, according to Christine Guitar, head of PR for Traverse City Area Public Schools (TCAPS), 80 percent of ticket purchases traditionally come from family members anyway.

For Esper, the situation is less about a communication breakdown or logistical hurdle than a sign that both schools have thriving music programs and boundless talent.

“One of the initial intentions of going to two schools was to give more students opportunities to do things like the musical,” Esper says. “But there was always an underlying concern of, ‘Can we keep the level of quality?’ I think this Newsies thing makes you sit back and reflect, because we’re 21 years into having two high schools, and we have two totally independent programs, and they’re both at the same level of quality that we had when we were a 3,000-student high school. We can run the hot new musical on both sides of town, and we’ve got the pit orchestra, the stagehand crew, and the singers to do it justice."