Director of Musical Theater Megan Doyle recently talked to us about why she thinks teaching children to work together is more important than teaching them to dance and sing, bringing Peter Pan to life during the pandemic, and what's in store for musical theater at 92Y in the coming months.
Tell us about the kind of environment that you create in your musical theater classes.
We want to mimic what the real world is as much as possible. If you go to a typical school musical, everyone is the same age. Here, we have students from pre-K to seniors in high school participating in the same programming, with the understanding that they will play different roles over time. They end up growing through roles and eventually mentoring, coaching, helping, and leading one another. That’s what we want the world to be — for us to be able to help each other.
You started at 92Y teaching dance, but lately you've been more focused on musical theater. What are some of the philosophical distinctions you make between teaching musical theater and dance? How is your approach different?
There’s no difference. I could teach basket weaving and go by the same philosophy. The number one guiding force for me is for students to learn how to be great humans — or, they're already great humans, and we want to help draw that out even more. We want to make them feel like they have a spot in this community. And these kids get it. They know that the most talented kid isn’t always going to get the biggest part, because that’s not always best for the community. They get that if one person played the big part last time, they’ll grow more if they play another part the next time around. Taking turns helps everyone. It’s like a big family. The ones who have done it before lead by example.
That being said, everything I believe about holistic, full-bodied storytelling gets much more complex and nuanced when we add speaking and singing. The “why” becomes central to everything we do. Why does this speech become a song? Why is dance essential to the story? Moving into musical theater has allowed what was foundational in dance to expand in innovative ways, and allows me to stretch all my muscles.
You’re having an extremely busy summer. Tell us about some of the exciting things that are happening in musical theater at 92Y right now and in the coming months.
For our workshops and intensives, we have kids here all day long — they take acting, singing and dance technique from 9-12, and then afterwards everyone comes together, from 4-year-olds to teens, for a crash course in putting a musical theater production together in a week. Everyone plays a part and cooperates to figure it out. They start on Monday, and by Friday they’re putting on a musical. We have 30-40 kids doing this each week, every week of July and August.
We also have Theater for Young Audiences, where we are putting together professional productions for kids and parents. We’ve made about 12 musicals in the last two years. Pretty soon we will make this a regular thing in a whole new space. Exciting things are happening. You’ll be hearing more about it soon.
You’ve been pulling double duty as a director and choreographer lately. What was the most challenging production you’ve ever worked on? And what was the most rewarding?
The same one — the Peter Pan we just did in Kaufmann Concert Hall, Adventure to Neverland. It was the first time we were welcoming families back to KCH since the pandemic began. We rehearsed in KCH under Covid restrictions and had two months to put the show together. I could only have four cast members. But what was really special was that it was four people who have been working with us for years. It wouldn’t have happened in any other way. We also had several children’s hospitals streaming it in. To know that we had all of these kids in a hospital in a pandemic going on a journey together with us — we had to do some things differently, but we got some amazing things out of it. I wanted to tell a story about imagination. We can go places together without going anywhere. To watch an audience do that together as a group was just magical.
What do you most hope the young people who work with you will take away from your classes?
To find who they are. Every child we work with is special. Getting kids to do musical theater is almost beside the point.