GRANITE BAY, BC — A homegrown, local high school musical is hitting the big time, and soon you'll be able to see it featured on HBO Max.
'Ranked, A Musical' premiered at Granite Bay High School in the spring of 2019. ABC10 has been following this show - and its impact - since 2019 and caught up with the creators after a big New York City premiere this past weekend.
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"‘Ranked’ tells the story of really high-achieving students doing whatever they can to succeed,” composer and lyricist David Taylor Gomes said.
By pure coincidence, this show about the pressures high school students face debuted at the height of the college admissions scandal. That’s when America learned the rich and the famous were bribing their kids' way into elite colleges, all orchestrated by a consultant named Rick Springer, who split his time between Sacramento and Newport Beach.
"When we saw these headlines playing out, it was like we were reading the plot of our show,” said Kyle Holmes, who wrote the script for ‘Ranked.’ “Like, 'These kids had no idea! They're at college, finding out that their parents lied to get them in! Their worlds are destroyed,' and we're like, 'That's our play!'"
Back in 2019, Gomes told ABC10, “My dream for this musical is to see it performed at high schools all across the country.”
In this case, dreams come true.
Since the premiere of 'Ranked' two and a half years ago, Holmes - who wrote ‘Ranked’ for Granite Bay High School, where he was Theater Arts Director at the time - and Gomes have had dozens of schools across the country reach out, asking to perform the musical.
The growing popularity of this original musical caught the attention of documentary filmmakers, who captured the rise of the performances – and the pivot when the pandemic hit.
“This documentary follows a school in Cupertino, California; Ripley, West Virginia and in the Bronx, as they’re all working on their own productions of ‘Ranked,’” Holmes explained. “And then COVID happens and life happens and just this beautiful look into their lives.”
ABC10 spoke with Holmes and Gomes overlooking Times Square in New York City this past weekend, after they attended the premiere of their documentary.
“It was such a unique and interesting experience for us to have someone making art about our art,” Holmes said. “It's such a gift for us to see into all of these lives of these kids performing ‘Ranked.’”
“We got to actually meet the students who are featured in the film, who've been performing our show but we've never met them before,” Gomes said. “It was cool to meet the kids. It almost felt like meeting celebrities!”
They say students are at the heart of this show.
“We really tried to make young people's voices the ones that were guiding the narrative,” Holmes said, “And I think what (documentary filmmakers) Annie (Sundberg) and Ricki (Stern) have done with this film is the same thing; they center the students, they center the young people, and it’s their lives and their perspectives and their stories that are kind of guiding the documentary. And I think that that's very rare, and I think it's very special.”
The two-hour documentary feature film – called “My So-Called High School Rank” - will be released on HBO and HBO Max on Nov. 29.
Ranked, A Musical’ is also achieving something that’s difficult to do.
When it comes to a musical a high school performs – like Grease, My Fair Lady and The Music Man – typically, the show runs on Broadway, where it gains popularity, and then schools license it for performances.
As far as they know, Gomes and Holmes told ABC10, 'Ranked' is the first musical ever to be licensed at this rate (75 productions in less than three years) without first playing in a professional theater; 'Ranked' has only ever been performed by students.
Holmes and Gomes have even launched a whole new company around this. Knowing that there must be other composers and writers out there in the same situation they’re in, the pair launched a company called Uproar Theatrics, to help smaller, lesser known pieces get licensed for performances by schools and beyond.
“At this point, we have 30 plays and musicals in our catalog that kind of focus on the lives of 15- to 30-year-olds, and we're licensing them to high schools and professional theaters and community theaters…all over the country and in some European countries,” Homes said. “‘Ranked’ has really been a part of springboarding that call-to-action for us to find new pieces that have heart like ‘Ranked,’ that we're trying to get out there in the world, to find new audiences and new people. And maybe these pieces - these musicals and plays - were maybe overlooked when they were first kind of introduced into the world of theater.”
Ultimately, they say, they’d love to see ‘Ranked’ performed professionally in New York.
“Obviously, that's really expensive, so what we need to do is secure the right team and get investors and really just start building the business of what that commercial production of the show could be,” Gomes said.
“And this documentary is a big part of that,” Holmes added. “It's a real proof-of-concept for what this show can be and the impact it can have, and so we're really optimistic that the right people are going to come across this documentary and see how much these kids and their communities believed in it and, you know, fall in love with it and believe in it as well.”
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