Earlier this summer, when I'd tell friends and colleagues that I was readying to visit the International Thespian Festival, I got a surprisingly similar response: “The International Thespian Festival is in Bloomington, Indiana?” And to tell the truth, Indiana does kind of come out left field. Most people associate the theatre industry with New York City, or other major hubs like Chicago. But like many things about the annual Thespian Festival, if you haven’t been, it’s kind of hard to wrap your head around—It’s that singular.
The annual week-long event is put on by the Educational Theatre Association, a group dedicated to supporting arts education around the world, along with increasing access to theatre training in schools via their philanthropic arm, the Educational Theatre Foundation. The Thespian program is an honor society run by EdTA that theatre kids, onstage and off, can join at their local high school. And the annual Festival is when troupes from all over the world gather for a week of performances, classes, networking opportunities, college auditions, vendors, and more—everything the young theatre hopeful needs to expand their minds, inspire their hearts, and fill out their bag of tricks as they get ready to become the future of theatre.
When you’re in your hometown high school, you can feel like one of a handful, if not the literal only kid who has that undying passion for theatre—guess how I know that! At the International Thespian Festival, kids find out there are literally thousands just like them, all equally ready to learn and share and perform and laugh. It’s so many, in fact, that this is why the Festival is held in Bloomington, on the campus of Indiana University. New York City might (arguably) be the center of the theatre world in the U.S., but it simply doesn’t have the capacity, the physical space to welcome this amount of theatre artists that the Festival attracts. In a world where one’s love of theatre can all too often feel niche, the International Thespian Festival is a place where theatre suddenly becomes top of mind for everybody everywhere, and in a big way.
It's a heady experience. You’re as liable to hear the latest top-10 hit being sung as you cross the quad as you are to hear a few refrains of “Dead Mom” from Beetlejuice The Musical. And you’re equally liable to hear a line or two from a Shakespeare sonnet, or a monologue from Jocelyn Bioh’s latest. Head indoors to where workshops are happening, and you might see kids learning about theatre history, learning choreography from Broadway professionals, writing songs with Broadway composers, and so much more. And then at night, you can head to one of the giant auditoriums for a fully produced play or musical from one of the visiting troupes. It's one of the top honors for a troupe's production to be selected, and the caliber of performance is breathtaking.
The Festival brings the A-list, too. At this year's Festival alone, Stephen Schwartz and two-time Tony winning Suffs writer and star Shaina Taub made appearances, both to the screams of adoring, theatre-loving kids. As someone whose high school lamentably did not have a Thespian troupe and therefore a route to the Thespian Festival, I can only imagine what it must be like to be there as a theatre-loving teenager. I would have felt like I’d died and gone to heaven.
“When you’re in your own school, you’re used to the talent that’s around you. And suddenly you’re in this environment where there are other kids like you,” says Paul Canaan, a dancer and choreographer who’s one of the hundreds of Broadway professionals that descend on the Festival annually to lead workshops for both kids and educators there for professional development. Canaan, who worked closely with Jerry Mitchell through much of his Tony-winning career in shows like Legally Blonde and Kinky Boots, works as an educator year-round via Take It From the Top, a program he co-founded and runs with his Legally Blonde co-star Laura Bell Bundy. But he says his time at the Thespian Festival is different—because the kids are different.
“They’re the true ride-or-die theatre kids, which is awesome,” Canaan says. “And they’re so well rounded. They learn tech, they learn performance, they learn history—they get it all.” Being in a theatre class or going to a summer camp in your hometown often means being there with some kids that really want to be there, but also kids that are there because their mom wanted them to be. Not at ITF. At ITF, kids are immersed with dozens of kids that are all laser focused on honing their theatrical artistry. And, Canaan says, that allows them to do things in workshops that you simply can’t do in other environments.
“So many kids come to the Legally Blonde class that I teach, and they basically already know the steps because they’ve been obsessed watching the MTV filming,” he says laughing. Canaan says he frequently finds himself adding to his sessions on the fly because the kids are able to do so much more than what he’s used to in other educational settings. “You get so much more out of anything that you come to in that spirit,” Canaan shares. “And the more people that come in that spirit, the more it impacts everybody in the room.”
This year was the first ITF Festival for Canaan’s Take It From the Top colleague Jacob Yandura, also the composer of Broadway’s How to Dance in Ohio. Yandura got to lead a first-of-its-kind songwriting workshop at this year’s Festival, meeting for an early week session to talk about his score to Ohio and how it uses music to build its characters before letting the kids go off on their own for a couple days and write their own music. Yandura had expected kids to come back with snippets, maybe a verse or a refrain. “We had about 15 kids come in with full songs,” he says. “I was stunned. I became close with a lot of them. Several have now sent me full projects to read, and I got to give them feedback on how they could go further. Seeing the stories that this younger generation is excited about and wanting to tell, it’s so inspiring. It makes me want to go even deeper into my own writing.”
The scale of attendance and enthusiasm can have some unique challenges. A masterclass from Broadway’s Carly Hughes I attended while visiting this year’s Festival was so popular that Hughes had just five minutes to work with each individual kid. But, Hughes says, when you have kids working at the level of Thespian kids, you can get a lot done with that. And more importantly, the entire group watches the whole class, so that means they all get a variety of lessons as they watch her work with each student.
“I don’t want them to realize later what I meant in the room,” she says. “I want them to get it right away. You have to figure out something that person can use, something that is tailored to that kid.” Hughes' class invited kids to sing a short cut of a musical theatre song, after which she’d work on an acting element or a singing technique element with the student. And as it so happened, Hughes’ ability to tailor the experience for each individual kid was well on display during my time in the class, when she worked with a student who was hearing impaired.
“I was like, okay. I’m not going to sit here and make you feel different,” she told me later of the experience. “Show me what you got.” Most kids sang with recorded accompaniment that they’d brought. This student said that would have required too much specialized equipment that he didn’t have, and so he sang a cappella. “And I realized we’d handle the acting part,” Hughes says. “I focus on what he is presenting. He’s brave enough to be up here, singing with no music. What can he get from it? Everybody deserves something.” Hughes ability to make outsized impacts of the kids' performances in just a minute or two was palpable. And it was always the kind of impact that every student watching could see in the performance.
Hughes became involved with the Festival after being selected as a Princess Grace Scholarship recipient in a young artist herself. The program, administered via the Educational Theatre Foundation, provides financial support and professional mentoring opportunities to high school– and college–aged kids, which can—and was, in Hughes’ case—be transformative to a career and life. Hughes is such a success story of the program (Chicago, Beautiful, Pippin, and Ragtime are just a handful of her many Broadway credits) that she now works with the Princess Grace and Educational Theatre Foundations to select kids for the program, auditioning them at the Festival and leading master classes as well.
And the Princess Grace Scholarships are just one of many scholarship and college-aimed experiences kids have available to them at ITF. Many of the Thespy Awards, handed out at the end of the week to recognize work brought to the Festvial, include scholarship components. Kids can also visit a vast floor of representatives from major theatre programs at colleges and universities from around the world, meeting and talking to them face to face. In many cases, they can even audition to go to those programs onsite.
But perhaps the most unique element of the Thespian Festival is that it is not just a place that gathers young performers. Theatre takes a village, and ITF puts equal weight on the artistry that goes on backstage, too, an area that often tends to be in dire need of a spotlight.
One of the artists leading the charge in that department is Matt Conover, a former high school Thespian himself who is now Vice President of Disney Live Entertainment at Disneyland in California. Conover went to school for lighting design, and in his work with Disney, he oversees technical elements on a wide variety of live performances.
And, he says, he also knows how often kids don’t even know to think about the various backstage jobs. “There are at least two to three jobs behind the scenes for every job you see on stage,” Conover says. “If you expand that to front of house, box office, all that other stuff, it’s even more. And those are the jobs kids don’t necessarily think about.” Many kids, Conover says, might love theatre but think they don’t have a place in the industry because they don’t want to perform. And that’s why he’s made it one of his missions in his work with EdTA to expose kids to the full variety of career possibilities. “If you love math and you love theatre,” he says, “be a production accountant. There’s so many ways to follow your passion of theatre along with your other passions that might not be on stage or directly behind the scenes.”
One of Conover’s babies when it comes to the Thespian Festival is the Backstage Challenge, an event that sees teams from visiting Thespian Troupes performing Olympic-style challenges made up of backstage tasks. You might see teams racing against the clock to get a fast change done, or properly plugging in speakers to a sound board. It’s one of the most fun events at ITF, mostly because it puts kids front and center who are used to being backstage and in the dark—and you can see on their faces what it means to get that attention.
The Challenge also has a uniquely quirky sense of humor, which Conover says is kind of baked in. “It’s the, almost, campiness of spotlighting something that is inherently not supposed to be center stage, that was designed to be hidden,” he says. That sometimes plays out as a group of students spike marking a set design on a stage floor to the soundtrack of Rocky Balboa running up those steps, or in the cheeky and fun Kahoot! quizzes they play with the entire audience between events. Conover has made sure the event is infused with the fun and off-beat sense of humor that tends to thrive in backstage circles, making it both welcomed and apropos along with just being fun.
And the impacts are myriad. The simple existence of the Backstage Challenge (which has become more involved in recent years since it became a production of Disney Live Entertainment via Conover) gives students and their teachers accolades to aspire to. “The reality is that many administrators are seeking a win, a trophy,” Conover says. “That’s how they’re seen as having success in a program—and kids do that too, not just administrators.” Conover has worked to make sure that backstage students have parity in their onstage recognition in the Festival’s opening and closing ceremonies, and has championed the addition of additional Thespy Award categories honoring backstage work, too. And, he says, it's making the backstage element of the Thespian Festival get bigger. He says this year’s Backstage Challenge had sixty percent more kids participating than last year thanks to all his work to increase awareness.
But, he says, trophies aren’t the real impact of his work, nor of the Festival at large. It’s the kids. “The success is in that student who is inspired by something that happened at the Festival,” he says proudly. Conover says this can be a kid being inspired by a performance they see during the week, or as small as a brief one-on-one off-the-cuff conversation with an industry professional, something the Festival facilitates for the kids that attend. Something as simple as asking how someone got their job, Conover says, can completely change a kid's life and career trajectory.
“I don’t think that we inspire in groups of 3,000,” he says. “We inspire in ones and twos. My favorite moments are those moments you don’t realize until after. It’ll be two years after a Festival, and I’ll get a note from a student who says, ‘I saw you at ITF and you said x-y-z. And now I’m a student at Baldwin Wallace. Because of you I applied for and got a job at Disney. Because of you I’m teaching theatre in my hometown. It meant the world, the people who did that for me when I was young. And it means the world to me to give that back now.”
Get a closer look at the 2025 International Thespian Festival with the video below:
