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Close your eyes and learn to believe. It's time to pass through the looking glass.

The Woodland Hills Department of Performing Arts is thrilled to present a pilot production of "Wonderland" through a special arrangement with Music Theatre International. The show features alternating casts, providing multiple students with the opportunity to step into the lead roles. "Wonderland" opens with patron's night on Thursday, April 25 and will be performed Friday, April 26 and Saturday, April 27 at 8 p.m., with an additional matinee on Saturday at 2 p.m. The show continues the following week with 8 p.m. shows running Thursday, May through Saturday, May 4, as well as a matinee on Saturday, May 4 at 2 p.m. Tickets can be purchased online at whhs.ludus.com.

A modern spin on Lewis Carroll's famed novels "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass," this version finds Alice as an adult living in Queens, New York and trying to juggle family life with a demanding career. Neither is going well, as Alice is on the verge of splitting from her husband, Jack, which prompters her daughter, Chloe, to long for a normal family.

At work, Alice finds herself in competition with a coworker on a major project. Determined to come out on top, Alice throws herself into the project by working late. She falls asleep at work and eventually descends into the mad world of Wonderland. It is in that fantastical place where Alice meets characters old and new. There's the panicky White Rabbit, the cryptic Caterpillar, and the charismatic El Gato. Of course, there's also the White Knight, who believes he's the hero to guide Alice on her journey. Through it all, the Queen of Hearts rules over Wonderland and while she seems reluctant to let Alice leave, the Queen has bigger problems. The Mad Hatter has been hatching a nefarious plan and Alice's arrival sets in motion a series of events that threaten to not only keep Alice in Wonderland but permanently change the world.

Featuring Mia Damico and Giavonna Zinn as Alice, the show also stars Mackenzie McPherson and Noelle Brubaker as Chloe, Robert Steiner and Liam Blaney as Jack/The White Knight, Juliana Connelly and Isabel Concepcion as the Queen of Hearts/Everheart, Livia Rocco and Hayden Crum as the Mad Hatter/Maddie Quizzle, Zacharias Barron as the Rabbit/Richard Hopper, Devontez Moses as the Caterpillar/Tyrell Leggett, Sonny Davis and Aidan Potter as Jose Purrez/El Gato, Leo Alfieri as Morris/Mo, and Blaney and Steiner in additional roles as the Victorian Gentleman, Janitor, and Disc Jockey.

Moyo Adebajo, Robert Felter, Adam Steiner, Davis, and Potter perform as Knights, Waiters, and members of the ensemble. Summer Curtright, Calise Cowans, Adore McFadden, and Olivia Safran perform as Ladies in Waiting.

Some familiar characters pop up in Wonderland, as well, including the Carpenter (Isaac Lott), Dormouse (Tommaso Scuoteguezza), Walrus (Alexia Abernathy), the Unicorn (Sabrina Bender), the Black and White Lady (Nevaeh Cauley), Tweedle Dee (Arianna Gaiter), Tweedle Dum (Luke DeVore), Turtle (Cayden Bristow), Snow Angel (Helena Marshall), Flamingo (Zion Rumble), Butterfly (Jae Saunders), Oyster (Lauren Hamer), and Flower (Payton Sarafis).

Additional members of the ensemble include Elizabeth Boone, J.J. Boone, Bree Boyd, Caitlin Burke, Ruslan Connelly, Caroline Elston, Payton Frederick, Sanai Hamilton, Amira Henderson-Thomas, Richard Master, Aubrie Moon, Jayda Payne-Dixon, Zari Rue, and Gretchen Van Deusen, as well as members of the previously named cast when they're not in a named role.

Originally written by Gregory Boyd and Jack Murphy with music by Frank Wildhorn and lyrics by Murphy, "Wonderland" debuted on Broadway in 2011 and featured Woodland Hills High School alum E. Clayton Cornelius as the Caterpillar. The show ended after a month, and it has since been substantially rewritten by Jennifer Paulson-Lee and Gabriel Barre. Woodland Hills is one of two schools in the entire country granted the rights to produce this pilot production of the revised show. To learn more about that process, check out the story from earlier this year.

As a pilot production, the show challenged the cast and crew unlike any previous production, with sets, choreography, costumes, and more all designed from scratch.

The show is directed by Thomas G. Crone, with Larry George as executive producer and Robert Carr as producer. Joshua Beblo (scenic design), Madeline Steineck (lighting design), Joseph Slick (sound design), Jamie Glasser (stage manager), Dave and Kristy Lescinsky (technical directors), Barbara Blaney (business manager), Alicia Scaramuzzo (music director), Ashley Harmon (choreographer), and Darcy O'Neil (costume design) guided the student crew and cast through the production.

Zoe Painter served as the student director, Zoe Spear served as student stage manager, and Aidan Potter served as student choreographer. Grace Moon, Lucy Elston, and Owen Reeder served as crew captains for a dedicated student crew, with Carmella DeVore serving as student scenic designer.

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The Woodland Hills School District on Wednesday hosted superintendents from neighboring school districts, as well as multiple community partners, for a discussion about strengthening regional partnerships to address shared challenges. The primary discussion was about ways to continue to address gun violence in their respective districts, but the discussion also included potential partnerships and shared resources involving STEM education, career opportunities for students, and more.

Woodland Hills School District Superintendent Dr. Daniel Castagna welcomed superintendents and administrators from Gateway Area School District, Penn Hills School District, Steel Valley School District, and Wilkinsburg School District, as well as board members and administrators from Woodland Hills.

Community organizations were also on hand, including the Center for Victims, the Hughes Initiative, HOOP, the Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office, the Allegheny County Office of Violence Prevention, Greater Valley Community Services, Cure Violence, 412 Justice, and Allies for Children.

The goal of the gathering was to establish some connections and partnerships in the hopes of addressing shared challenges. Woodland Hills School District director of STEAM and innovation Tina Dietrich spoke about the possibility of using the Rankin Community Center as a hub for multi-district after-school STEM education programs modeled after the district’s new mother-daughter robotics club. R.C. Hughes from the Hughes Initiative spoke of the need and value of police interaction education for students. Ashley Blakeman from the Allegheny County Office of Violence Prevention and Cathy Jo Welsh from HOOP spoke about gun violence intervention, shared information about the Woodland Hills Peace Panel, and detailed plans for this year’s Wear Orange anti-gun violence campaign.

Lee Davis from Cure Violence and Greater Valley Community Services spoke about the contributing factors surrounding recent episodes of gun violence in communities in multiple districts throughout the Mon Valley. The group also discussed the possibility of developing shared bus routes for charter school students through a plan being workshopped by Allies for Children in an effort to reduce costs, the number of buses going to the same charter schools from multiple neighboring districts, and address driver shortages throughout the region.

The administrators and community representatives plan to meet regularly to develop collaborative ways to address these shared issues as well as others.

 

Over the last few years, Woodland Hills High School has become a fixture in PNC’s annual Code For Your Cause competition. The event provides a platform for teams of students from select high schools to showcase their coding and designing skills to solve community problems. In each of the last few years, Woodland Hills students under the direction of Computer Science teacher Mr. Aaron Minor have regularly earned personal prizes as well as money for the high school’s STEAM and Computer Science curriculum.

This year’s group featured students Rebecca Busch, Brandon Donaldson, Benjamin Hill, Annabel Johnson, Ewane Nanji, and A’Miya Tippett. After four months of work and a presentation at PNC on April 12, the group was awarded the User Interface User Experience Award for its personal wellness app. Students received a swag bag of gifts for their hard work, while the district will receive a $10,000 check for its curriculum.

“I feel accomplished and I think everyone else can feel that way, too,” said Hill, a junior who served as the primary developer. “I know, at least on my part, I spent a lot of time outside of school working on different solutions and trying to figure out different problems with how I was coding.”  

“We’d like to thank our teacher, Mr. Minor, for encouraging us to join these kinds of competitions,” Johnson said.

“He’s constantly on our backs making sure we meet the deadlines,” Tippett added with a laugh.

The competition pairs teams from each school with mentors from PNC. The mentors lay out the timeline that the students will navigate during the challenge, with the goal to have a built and tested app ready for presentation at the final event. The six students all came from Mr. Minor’s Advanced Placement Computer Science class.

“We met with the people at PNC just after winter break,” said Brandon Donaldson, a sophomore who served as a quality assurance tester. “We got the idea around late January, the coding and general look of it was done February-ish, and then it was fully usable around mid-to-late March. And then from there it was just making it look pretty.”

The challenge posed to the students was to develop an app that addressed a need or problem in their community. They chose to design a wellness app that tracked physical activity, water intake, and meditation time.  

“Ben did the backbone of the coding,” Johnson said. “We used two apps called Thunkable and Figma. Figma was the design aspect of it, where we laid out how we wanted everything to look. And we tied it in with the Thunkable app and that had the blocks of code.”

Hill said that the coding process involved a fair amount of extra research outside of class.

“It was definitely challenging learning a new app and a new way to code,” he said.

 

Once the foundation of the app was set, it was time to test.

“We had to create a log-in screen with registration, and that was the hardest part of the coding process,” said Tippett, a senior who worked on quality assurance. Tippett explained that they had to make sure that the app identified the username and passwords as the correct match so a user could log-in properly. There was also a lot of checking and re-checking of the various buttons in the app to ensure they were consistently functional.

The presentation at PNC also posed as a challenge. Busch said the group hadn’t had much of an opportunity to rehearse the actual presentation, so they did a couple of run-throughs that morning. Each of the four participating schools went through their slide deck, detailed the design and creation process, and capped it with a demo of their respective apps.

“We were the last school to go, which definitely made it rough, because everyone else was pretty good,” said Busch, a sophomore who handled a lot of the pre-development planning. “It was just an interesting experience.”

The team is at different stages of figuring out their futures, but a few have already decided that computer science is something they’d like to pursue. That made the competition all the more rewarding.

“I want to be a software developer or game developer, so this is right within what I want to do,” Tippett said.

“I think this is a great experience and I think it’s very beneficial for anyone looking to go into computer science field to join this competition,” Hill said.

“It’s like a job opportunity, too, because you get to talk to people at PNC,” Tippett added. “It’s just a great experience.”

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The words swirled in Olivia Davidson’s head. She felt the urge to write, but she wasn’t sure where to start. She only knew that a particular phrase kept coming back to her, and that she had to get her thoughts down as quickly as she could.

The Woodland Hills High School sophomore opened the notes app on her phone, tapped the microphone icon, and started talking. For six or seven minutes, she dictated a stream of consciousness into her phone, with one line serving as the centerpiece: “I begged you and begged you and begged you to love me back, and I begged you and begged you that didn’t hold me back.”

Davidson eventually shaped that line and the rest of her thoughts into a monologue titled “Dear Mama” that she performed as part of Omega Psi Phi’s annual Talent Hunt program. For her performance, she won first place in the category of Dramatic Interpretation.

Davidson knew she wanted to write and perform something related to Black mothers and the African American community, but she initially struggled to collect her thoughts. It was while listening to Erykah Badu and the soundtrack from “The Color Purple” that inspiration finally struck, and she believes the emotions from those songs helped unlock everything for her.

“It’s not tethered to a specific song, but I think it was the genre of music that did something,” she said.

She had the option of performing a piece from a film or a play, but knew she would have a deeper connection to something personal.

“I know what the intention was behind it and I know what it was written for,” she said. “I knew that there were so many people out in that crowd who would have related to it.”

The Talent Hunt is an annual campaign by Omega Psi Phi to recognize talented, young performing and visual artists. Davidson found out about the competition after representatives from Omega Psi Phi visited her performing arts class at Woodland Hills. An aspiring actress, Davidson has made appearances in Woodland Hills productions of “Legally Blonde,” “Seussical,” and “Clue.” She’s also active in advocacy organizations, participating in the Peace Panel, the Woodland Hills Student Summit, Black Student Union, international studies, and the Black Girls Advocacy Leadership Alliance.

The Iota Phi chapter of Omega Psi Phi sponsored the local competition, which Davidson said featured an impressive array of talent. Held inside a church, with a stage in front, each performer had an opportunity to impress the judges with their performance.  Along with her award for Dramatic Interpretation, Davidson said she received more personal feedback from those in the audience, and even from one of the judges.

“I genuinely appreciate and value how receptive the audience was because it could have been a very different way. And it motivates me to keep going,” she said. “And because I'm so passionate about speaking for people who don't have a voice, being able to go up there and give a voice to people who look like me, and who feel like me, and who know what it's like to be me, is so much bigger.”

Davidson had the chance to perform the piece again at another event full of multiple generations of African American women. She was touched by the feedback from the women in the audience.

“A lot of older women were like, “What you said really resonated with me. I felt every word you said. My mom was like that and being able to hear you actually inspires me,” Davidson recalled.

Davidson said that though the piece was personal, she felt it resonated with the audiences because it reflected shared experiences and allowed them to see themselves in her performance.

“I'm a very big believer in compassion and empathy and living a life of sonder and recognizing that every single person is their own individual with their own ideals and their own experiences and their own feelings, and everyone is valid in their own right,” she said. “So being able to tell them that there are people out there who will accept you for who you are, and there are people who align with you, I think it brings a sense of solidarity. And I believe that solidarity is comfort. So, I think that knowing there's people out there who relate to you, and who are just like you, brings a sense of safety and security to people.”

Now “one million percent” more confident in her abilities, Davidson is looking forward to more opportunities to perform and to be an advocate. She recently signed up for a slam poetry competition, has been busy expanding her network, and is looking forward to making more connections.

“I think that this performance opened a lot of doors and opportunities. I also think that I have a very good support system. A lot of the women that mentor me and a lot of the women that I associate with are trying to help me become not just the best version of myself in my own private way, but in my own public way. I think that I have lots of opportunities to grow, and I'm going to take advantage of as many as I can.”

Dear Woodland Hills Families,

 

The end of the school year is quickly approaching, which means preparing our students to take the online Keystone Exams. The spring Keystone Exams will be administered from May 13th through May 24th. In preparation, we would like to make parents aware of which students will be required to take the exams. Students enrolled in a Keystone trigger course — Honors Algebra I or Algebra I, Keystone Algebra Workshop, Honors Biology or Biology, Keystone Science Workshop, Honors English 10 and English 10 – will automatically be scheduled for the exams.

 

All other students who were previously enrolled in trigger classes are eligible to take the exams to fulfill their Act 158 Graduation Requirement (more information on the ACT 158 pathways can be found on the next page). Starting with the Class of 2023, all students will need to fulfill one of the five pathways, in addition to earning the 25 credits required to graduate.

 

CLICK HERE for all the information!