Arts & Entertainment

Students from Chantilly High, Westfield High, Nominated for Cappies Theater Awards

Awards will be announced at ceremony next Sunday, June 9, at the Kennedy Center.

The Fourteenth Annual Cappies Gala — honoring area high school theater students — will take place next Sunday, June 9 at 7 p.m. at the Concert Hall at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Students from both Chantilly High School and Westfield High School are among those nominated for awards. Click on the photo gallery to find photos of each student listed here.

And the nominees from Chantilly are:

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Stephanie Feeback, Lead Actress in a Play, Chantilly High School's "You Can't Take It With You."

Matt Calvert, Lead Actor in a Play, Chantilly High School's "You Can't Take It With You."

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Mitchell Buckley, Lead Actor in a Play, Westfield High School's "Flowers for Algernon."

Julian Sanchez, Play Nominee, Westfield's "Flowers for Algernon"

Michael Hawthorne, Play Nominee, Chantilly's "You Can't Take It With You"

Madeleine Bloxam, Marketing and Publicity Nominee, Westfield High School

Who will win?

Performers, critics and tech crews from 56 high schools in Northern Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., will receive 37 prestigious “Cappie” awards, in a glamorous atmosphere that Cappies (Critics and Awards program) co-founder and Capitol Steps co-founder, Bill Strauss, used to call “part Tonys, part Final Four.” 

Casts of nominated shows and the performers of nominated songs will present musical numbers as well as sketches from the nominated plays. The entire show will be aired on Cox Cable “Red Apple” Channel 21 later in the summer.

The photos attached will give you a glimpse of the Cappies performers and some of the tech crew members as photographed by Andrea (Andy) Mays at Meadowlark Botanical Gardens in Vienna.

Throughout the year, the Cappies program is driven by more than 380 area high school theater student critics who attend each others’ shows, write reviews for newspapers and TV, and serve as “Cappies” awards judges.

Over the past 14 years, more than 2,000 student-written Cappies reviews have been published by The Washington Post, ShowBizRadio.com and more than a dozen other area newspapers in both hard copy and online.

On May 11, approximately 300 student critics voted for Cappie awards, through a digital, student-designed voting process. A list of nominees (five for each of the 37 award categories) is available on the NCA Cappies homepage under awards.

Launched in Northern Virginia in 1999 by Bill Strauss and Judy Bowns, Cappies programs are now underway in 11 U.S. cities, including Cincinnati, Kansas City, and Orlando, and three in Canada, with more cities who are preparing to start up in the fall.

Bill Strauss, who died in 2007, always proudly said: “High School Theater is the real youth culture in America, and someday, these kids are going to revitalize Broadway. They’re the next great theater generation.”    

Tickets to the gala are only available only through Cappies  high school theater departments.


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