Patch Picks: Woodland Hills Returns to Broadway Saturday in Alumni Cabaret

For most young performers, the energy and magic of performing in a high school musical is something that arrives suddenly and vanishes with graduation.

But, thanks to the , some alumni have the chance to relive their moment in the spotlight.

This Saturday, the sixth annual Alumni Cabaret will close the Woodland Hills All-District Art Show at the Braddock Carnegie Library. The showcase will give recent graduates and alumni of Woodland Hills’ musicals a chance to show off what they’ve learned since high school.

“The Woodland Hills School District has become known for its musicals,” said Kathleen Good, a Woodland Hills Foundation board member and producer of the cabaret. “People had started to ask, ‘I wonder what this student or that student is doing now?’ So we got the idea to find these alumni and put on the cabaret.”

“It’s started to take off, and now we have 17 alumni performing,” she said. Good of Edgewood has produced each of the annual performances. Her fellow board member and Woodland Hills alum Jamie Glasser serves yearly as the show’s director.

Just weeks after this year’s , Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera, thrilled audiences, buzz is high about the theater program at Woodland Hills. Last week, that production received twelve nominations in the annual for Excellence in High School Musical Theater. Winners will be announced in a May 28 ceremony at downtown’s Benedum Center.

Good says that the cabaret usually features showtunes or pieces that students have worked on since graduation. Some, however, choose to perform songs that they sang on the WHHS stage in high school.

“Some of these alumni are in performance programs, but others hung up their singing voice long ago and are in other careers,” she said.

The show caps off the week-long All-District Art Show, another recent project of the Woodland Hills Foundation. Since this past Saturday, work from students from kindergarten to 12th grade has been exhibited throughout the Braddock Carnegie Library. Parents and students will get their final chance to take in the exhibit following the cabaret during a coffee and dessert reception.

If the popularity of the cabaret among alumni and current students is to be trusted, Good says, it should be a fixture at the Art Show for years to come.

“We have several who have done it just about every year since we started,” she said. “They just enjoy coming back and performing again.”

The Alumni Cabaret will take place Saturday night at 7:30 p.m. in the Braddock Carnegie Library’s Music Hall. Tickets are $10, and are available at ShowClix.