high school theater musical with literally no budget

I'm a teaching artist at a new high school. We have only 90 students, and 12 desperately want to do a musical this spring. Of those 14, only 3 have ever been in musicals, and that was in middle school (Lion King etc). I have no budget. And by that I mean I don't even have $1000! And I have no space. We have a modern-looking "multi purpose room" on the lower school campus we can use.

Yet another limitation is that, though I've been directing professionally for 15 years, I've never directed a musical!

Is it possible to do a musical without set and choreography? They passionately want to do a "real" musical - they don't, for example, want to do "Songs for a New World" (no book or story) or "Emma! A Pop Musical." What do you think about doing a show like "Rent" only on mikes, like the way "Seasons of Love" is filmed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hj7LRuusFqo

I adore musicals but I hate bad high school theater musicals ...! I don't want that to happen! I want it to be amazing. So I think we should really know our limitations and not try to do more than we can.

Grateful for your ideas!

You could do Footloose, The Last 5 Years, Grease, You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, The Fantasticks,
Rent, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee to name a few, all of which can be done great and low-budget.

Except ALL of those cost money to get rights and royalties for. while I don't know about Peter, the others will all cost more than 1K....which she doesn't have anyway.



You might need to explain the them that its just not possible with no budget. Unless you can do a small play now, and hope to raise enough money for later in the year. And have THEM do fundraisers. If they want to do a musical so badly, they need to do the work.

I agree that your students should be responsible for fundraising if they want to perform a musical. Musicals are always expensive, thanks in part to royalty payments, and not having a choreographer/music director on-hand may mean setting yourselves up for failure (especially if you have no previous musical theatre directing experience). As someone who completely botched her first HS musical experience, take it from me that directing musicals can be way harder than it looks!

For this year, your students might be satisfied doing a musical theatre concert featuring their favorite individual songs. You'll still need to pay for royalties for those individual songs (find more information on how to do that here), but it'll be a lot less expensive than producing an entire musical. I know that your students said that they didn't want to do a song cycle like Songs for a New World, but their hesitation might fall by the wayside if they know that they're going to get to perform their dream songs from their all-time favorite musicals. If they enjoy doing the concert, then you can immediately start talking with them about how to fundraise the royalty payments for a full-scale musical the following year.