- Arts + Music
- Upper School
McCallie senior Sye Simmons doesn’t need to use his fingers or an abacus to total the number of theater productions he’s taken part in at either McCallie or GPS since he entered the sixth grade.
“It’s 23,’ he said recently. “That’s the most of any student at either school.”
It also doesn’t take him long to list a favorite. “That’s easy,” he said. “This one. Footloose, hands down.”
When the joint McCallie/GPS Theater production of Footloose begins its three-day run inside GPS’s Frierson Theatre on Friday night at 7, (with subsequent shows on Saturday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m.) it will be hard to miss Simmons, who has 220 speaking lines as male lead Ren McCormack, appears in five dance numbers, including one solo turn, and sings throughout the expansive, toe-tapping musical, which first hit movie theaters in 1984.
“I started taking dance lessons at CCS (Chattanooga Christian School) for three hours every Saturday, beginning in August,” said Simmons. “I was an absolutely horrible dancer when I started.”
And now?
“I can confidently say that I’m the best guy dancer in the show,” he said. “Now a lot of the girls can still wipe the floor with me, but I do all right for a guy.”
He’s also been hard at work on his vocal work, skipping lunch every Friday to take vocal lessons.
The vocal part has been challenging for female lead and GPS senior Madison Sabin, who plays the headstrong preacher’s daughter Ariel Moore.
“My background is more in dance,” said Sabin, who previously played Karen a couple of years ago in Mean Girls. “I was taking ballet when I was three years old. I’ve had to train a lot vocally for this. Endless hours, really.”
This is far from the first time Simmons and Sabin have worked together theatrically. The two were in numerous plays at Bright School together from kindergarten through fifth grade.
“Maybe 14 total,” said Simmons. “We’ve come full circle. Madison brings such energy to the cast. And she’ll ride me pretty hard if I don’t know my lines. She’s very dedicated. She gets me wanting to do my best every day.”
It is a testament to the timeless message of Footloose that a 42-year-old movie could still elicit such interest from today’s youth. Even director Chelsea Padro wasn’t born until a year after the movie first debuted, though she does have an interesting story on actor Kevin Bacon, who played Ren in the film and later became the focus of the parlor game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” since it seemed almost every 1980s film could be linked in some way to Bacon.
“I’m a huge fan of Bacon,” Padro said in an email. “I even got to meet him once while I was working at a music venue in Annapolis (Maryland), where he played with his band, the Bacon Brothers. I’ve also met the actor who played the principal, Sam Dalton, as he lives not far from Chattanooga. So I suppose I have a lot of connections to the movie.”
Much of what drew her to the play, beyond the ability to involve a combined 79 students from McCallie and GPS: 46 in the cast, 27 on the tech crew, and six featured Terpsichord dancers, was the message it sends about listening to others.
“The message is not only about using your voice to stand up for your beliefs,” wrote Padro. “It’s also to communicate with those who may think differently than you, so that we can reach an understanding together. It shows how important it is to talk to each other, especially within different generations.”
For anyone unaware of the plot, Ren’s a big-city kid who moves from Chicago with his mother to a small Midwest town after his father abandons them. Ren loves rock-and-roll music and dance but quickly discovers his new residence frowns on both, mostly because Ariel’s brother was killed in a car crash returning from a dance and her father, Pastor Shaw Moore, has convinced the community that such music and dance are the devil’s brew. Ren makes it his mission to change this.
“It’s really about forgiveness,” said Simmons. “Ren forgiving his father for abandoning him and Ariel’s dad forgiving God for his son’s death.”
It’s also about joy, the joy of self-expression through dance and song and the shared joy that can come from experiencing those things with others. When Sabin was asked what she most enjoyed about her role in Footloose, her answer could not have been more profound regarding what Ren wanted to bring to the town’s young people.
“What I love the most,” she said, “is that I get to dance and have fun with my friends.”
Could any words better sum up the goal of every high school prom ever staged better than those?
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