June 19, 2009, 10:07PM

Melissa Phillip Chronicle

Teachers Allison Peterson, of Dallas, left, and Diane Shaw, of Weatherford, react during an exercise at a workshop at Theatre Under the Stars on Friday. ?They learned to select shows, build sets and to persuade even the most reluctant.

It’s one of the toughest challenges of producing a middle school musical: getting boys to audition. One teacher shared her secret at the kickoff of a weekend workshop at Theatre Under the Stars: Offer them free food.
While getting reluctant boys to sing and dance on stage is an age-old problem, educators now find themselves facing the equally daunting task of staging the performances amid the tremendous budget and testing pressures facing school systems.

Teachers from across the nation are in Houston learning to produce musicals with little money and sometimes even less formal training in the arts.

Some of the nearly 20 participants admitted they are being asked to run their elementary or middle school’s arts program even though they’re trained as English or science teachers.

“I’ve absolutely been hyperventilating. I’ve been in musicals, but I’ve never directed an entire musical,” Sheila Boyce, a teacher in Miami, confessed to the group.

Conducted by New York-based iTheatrics, the three-day workshop is training educators to select shows, build sets and to encourage even the most reluctant students to audition for school performances. This is the first year that the workshop has been conducted in Houston.

“We want them to leave feeling empowered and having a deep toolbox of resources,” said Tim McDonald, who runs iTheatrics, a company that, among other things, adapts Broadway musicals for schoolchildren.
Producing a musical involving hundreds of children is a major management endeavor, McDonald said. Teachers must know how to best allocate their limited resources without stretching themselves too thin.

When they master that technique, it can pay major dividends to a school, he said.

“Principals and school boards like musicals because they can involve 150 to 300 kids. It’s a good bang for their buck,” McDonald said. “And they almost never flop. Kids singing and dancing — it’s hard not to like.”
With so much focus these days on academic testing, administrators should remember that involvement in the arts has repeatedly been shown to improve students’ grades, test scores and attendance, experts said.

“Music and math go hand-in-hand. It builds their self esteem, discipline and team work,” said Stephanie Blue, a piano teacher at Houston ISD’s MacGregor Elementary School.

Even though her campus is an arts-focused magnet, she said its budget has still faced funding cuts in recent years. Currently, most students receive about 90 minutes a week of arts instruction, she said.

“We still get the job done, but it’s a little more work,” she said.

jennifer.radcliffe@chron.com