Kailynn Hernandez ’27 and Chloe Einaudi ’27 have been chosen to compete in the Roger Rees awards for their outstanding performance in this year’s musical: “Alice by Heart.” Roger Rees (1944-2015) was an actor and director known and awarded for his lead role in the play “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.” The Roger Rees Award process entails multiple scouts attending high school performances across every state, searching for talent. The students in the state with the top two scores are sent to the competition in Marymount Manhattan College on May 2. The first round consists of singing a solo from your school’s musical for a panel of judges before moving on to the next round.
These awards serve as an audition to compete in the Roger Rees showcase, which is with a group of 50 high school students. One girl and one boy will win that showcase and advance to the Jimmy Awards. These awards can be a massive success for a future career in theater, as this is what began Reneé Rapp’s, a famous actor and dancer, successful musical and theatrical career on Broadway as Mean Girls’ Regina George.
For student actresses Hernandez and Einaudi, this award could give them recognition beyond what they have received from school performances, pushing them further in the professional world.
Hernandez said that she was “super excited when she heard the news” that she was nominated. She explains how it was “[her] first experience being professionally judged,” and she “greatly appreciated that they also gave notes for improvement.” Hernandez’s role in this year’s musical was the Queen of Hearts. She said that the role was “a very mean and sassy type of charactor. It was honestly hard for [her] at the beginning of the show to get into that character, because [she’s] a quieter and more reserved person. [She] feels like [she] started to get out of [her] shell the moren [she] worked with the character and her mannerisms,” said Hernandez.
She felt both challenged and pushed to be a better actress, mentioning how much she “learned from the directing of Performing Arts Faculty, Drama and Director Mariko Watt, as well as assistant directors Val Aberle ’27 and Grayson Monacelli ’26.” She continued,“That makes this nomination even more meaningful, all the hard work I did really paid off.” Hernandez is excited for “every single aspect, especially getting the experience outside of school to actually audition.”
As Rick Elice, a writer and former stage actor, wrote on the Roger Rees Awards website, “I hope everybody who is competing for the Roger Rees Awards understands this kind of lifelong commitment to trying to be better at what we, who work in the theater, try to do. What Roger’s life is a great example of is that you never stop learning, you never stop working, you never stop striving to be better.”
