Chagrin Valley Little Theatre

Is There Life After High School? by Craig Carnelia & Jeffrey Kindley

Performance Dates & Tickets

About the Play

Something about High School, for some reason, just sticks with us…

Directed by Don Edelman, Musical Direction by Regis Bookshar

Loosely inspired by Ralph Keyes' best-selling book with the same title, Is There Life After High School? uses exquisitely crafted songs by Craig Carnelia and insightful monologues by Jeffrey Kindley to take a nostalgic look back at the emotional roller coaster of high school.  Adolescent memories are brought to light, including interrupted friendships, late nights of beer drinking, and the horrors of gym class.  The times we "could not forget if we tried" make for a sweet, and sometimes bittersweet, musical reverie.

CVLT serves comfort-food musical

by Bob Abelman
The News-Herald, April 25 2008

Sometimes theater is a rich, multi-course gourmet meal, carefully prepared and magnificently served. Each mouthful stimulates the taste buds, fills the senses and nourishes the soul. At other times, theater is fast food - overly processed and full of meaningless calories. Each helping is void of good taste, hard to swallow and difficult to digest.

Is There Life After High School? - being served up by the Chagrin Valley Little Theatre in Chagrin Falls - is comfort food. Uncomplicated and calming, the show goes down easy, requires little effort to chew and leaves you absolutely satisfied. After Saturday’s production, audience members wanted little more than to push themselves away from the table, sigh with contentment and loosen their belts a notch.

Inspired by Ralph Keyes’ best-selling book with the same title, the musical is little more than a collection of songs, skits and soliloquies that take a wistful look back at high school. There is no story line per se, just a common theme.

Nine performers take on a variety of roles in an assortment of situations reflective of the pains and pleasures of adolescent formal education.

When not handled properly, this show can easily turn into a nostalgic, sugary confection. It is, after all, chock full of corny, sentimental stuff. In one syrupy song, composer Craig Carnelia actually rhymes "stars and stripes" with "holy cripes." That, no doubt, contributed to the show’s short-lived Broadway run of only 17 performances and to an outbreak of diabetes in the greater metropolitan area.

At CVLT, in the capable hands of experienced director Don Edelman, Is There Life After High School? maintains its integrity and balance. Edelman’s astute sense of showmanship, coupled with Ida Porris’ fluid choreography and Edmond Wolff’s solid set and lighting design, make for a very enjoyable, absolutely charming production. Shows like this are custom-made for the intimate CVLT stage.

Most of the credit goes to the exceptional cast of players. As a collective, Don Bernardo, Darlene Fowler, Chris Hunter, Steve Kay, Sharon Lloyd, Pat Mazzarino, Libby Merriman, Eric Oswald, and Maggie Wise produce some of the best harmonies and strongest vocal performances ever heard on the CVLT stage. They owned the audience halfway through the opening number.

As individual performers, each member of the cast is natural and immediately likable. Stand-out performances include a best-friend duet by CVLT veteran Sharon Lloyd and newcomer Darlene Fowler, which nearly stopped the show, and Maggie Wise’s stunning solo performance in “Diary of a Homecoming Queen."

The one distraction in this production is the age of the players. Ideally, the cast should be old enough so that high school memories resonate but not so old that they haunt or torment. This cast is too old, and its age range of nearly 30 years is way too broad. This is an unfortunate occupational hazard in community theater, but one that is easily dismissed once the singing begins and the seven piece orchestra, under the superb direction of Regis Bookshar, kicks in.

Comfort food is home-cooked, tasty, familiar fare. Is There Life After High School? most certainly fits the bill. Sidle up to the buffet.

About the Composer

As both composer and lyricist, Craig Carnelia contributed four songs to Studs Terkel's Working, for which he received a Tony nomination. Three Postcards, written with playwright Craig Lucas and presented at Off-Broadway's Playwright's Horizons, was named one of the year's ten best musicals by Time Magazine, and is included in the Burns-Mantle anthology, Best Play of 1986-1987, as Best Musical of the Season. In 1994, Three Postcards received a second production Off-Broadway, this time at Circle Rep.

Also Off-Broadway, Notes, a collection of Mr. Carnelia's songs, was presented by Manhattan Theatre Club. He contributed single songs to The No-Frills Revue, Diamonds and A...My Name Is Still Alice. Craig wrote the lyrics for the Broadway musical, The Sweet Smell of Success, with music by Marvin Hamlisch and book by John Guare. Hamlisch and Carnelia were also represented on Broadway later in 2002 by Imaginary Friends, a play with song by Nora Ephron. Craig has won a number of major songwriting awards, including the Johnny Mercer "Emerging American Songwriter" Award and the prestigious Kleban Award for distinguished lyric writing.