For 10th show, Center Stage looks to its last 9 musicals

• By ROBIN MILLER
• Arts writer
• Published: Jul 5, 2009

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And the award for best musical goes to … All Shook Up.

No. We’re not talking Tony Awards here. This may be better, a consensus among students at Center Stage Academy for the Performing Arts. They’re among the up-and-coming in musical theater.

They like the story of Chad, a 1950s hip-swiveling, guitar-playing roustabout. And they love the music, all Elvis Presley songs.
Most of all, they like the idea that they’ll be performing these songs once again. Yes, again.

The show is on Center Stage’s nine-musical roster. So, it goes without saying that pieces of All Shook Up will be included in the performing arts academy’s 10th musical, Before and Beyond: A Salute to Musical Theatre.

The show opens Thursday, July 9, in the Dutchtown High School Cafetorium. The place looks more like an oversized slumber party or church lock-in at the moment. Children sit on sleeping bags spread across the floor, waiting for their turn on stage.

Well, older performers, too. The age range here is 7-22, for a cast of 54. That’s 54 cast members performing more than 50 songs.
And music from All Shook Up will be among them.

“And it’s so exciting,” Taylor Morgan said.

“Yeah, we get on stage and start going through the routine and realize, ‘Hey, I remember how to do this,’” Lauren Waguespack said.
“It really is like seeing an old friend,” Emily Schexnaydre said.

Actually, they’re all talking at once, excited not only by the prospect of revisiting old performances but looking into the future.
“At the next 10 years,” Schexnaydre said.

She’s 17. Before and Beyond: A Salute to Musical Theatre will be her seventh Center Stage performance, the musical written by her dad, Larry Schexnaydre.

And Larry Schexnaydre? Well, he and wife Linda are founders and directors of Center Stage, as well as co-directors of this show.

Again, this marks Center Stage’s 10th production. Not 10th year — that anniversary will come next year. No, this is the school’s 10th production.

“We staged a musical in December and another one in the summer in our first year,” Larry Schexnaydre said. “We were very ambitious.”